During the AWS re:Invent 2015 conference their new IoT service was announced. This service facilitates the ingestion of a large amount of data from numerous devices that may be sporadically connected to the Internet.

I tried out the AWS tutorial and wanted to pass along a new notes.

I had some trouble installing an MQTT client on my MacBook Pro and was eventually able to get the MQTT.fx client dmg working from http://www.jensd.de/apps/mqttfx/0.0.18/.

I had not used that client before so I had to experiment a little with which cert file to put where.

A screenshot of the settings that I used is at MQTT.fx and AWS IoT settings

The cert files that you download may contain \n in a number of lines and you should replace those with newlines. Initially I had only noticed and replaced them after the CERTIFICATE----- lines and could not get a client to connect. Once I replaced all of them (the pem file contents should look like square blocks of text) I got it to work.

At this point you can have your MQTT client subscribe to a topic. The MQTT.fx subscribe window looks like this

Once you are subscribed then you can publish messages to that topic. The MQTT.fx publish window looks like this

Once I had the client working I was able to publish a number of messages and see them in the subscribe window which looks like this

Next I wanted to try out the new CloudWatch dashboards and created a dashboard.

I selected the IoT metrics from here

Then I picked the specific ones that I wanted to graph from here

That gave me a dashboard that looked like this

The IoT service is going to be an exciting means of collecting, processing and analyzing data from many different devices.