Thin-edge Agent

Thin-edge agent is a set of services that implement the device management operations on a device. Examples of such device management functionality include:

• software management, checking installed packages and updating these packages
• configuration management, checking and updating configuration files
• firmware management, updating the firmware of the device
• device restart
• remote access to a console on the device from the cloud
• log file management, retrieving excerpts from log files

note

In the current version of thin-edge, the agent features are not implemented by a single executable, but by a set of executables:

• tedge-agent
• c8y-configuration-plugin
• c8y-firmware-plugin
• c8y-log-plugin
• c8y-remote-access-plugin

The short-term plan is to re-organize these plugins to move the Cumulocity aspects into the Cumulocity mapper and to group the management operations into a single executable.

Thin-edge agent acts as a device connector:

• listening to operation requests published on the MQTT bus
• delegating the actual operations to the operating system or other components
• reporting progress of the requests

Operation MQTT topics

Operation requests are published by the requesters on operation specific topics:

tedge/commands/req/{operation-type}/{operation-action}

Where the combination of operation-type and operation-action is the well-known name of the operation request, such as:

• software/update
• control/restart

The corresponding operation responses are published to associated topics:

tedge/commands/res/${operation-type}/${operation-action}

Here are the topics used by the device management operations

Operation	Request Topic	Response Topic
Get Software List	tedge/commands/req/software/list	tedge/commands/res/software/list
Software Update	tedge/commands/req/software/update	tedge/commands/res/software/update
Get Configuration	tedge/commands/req/config_snapshot	tedge/commands/res/config_snapshot
Set Configuration	tedge/commands/req/config_update	tedge/commands/res/config_update
Get Log	tedge/commands/req/log/get	tedge/commands/res/log/get
Restart device	tedge/commands/req/control/restart	tedge/commands/res/control/restart
Remote connect	tedge/commands/req/control/connect	tedge/commands/res/control/connect