Introduction

What’s EMQ X?

EMQ X is an open-source, distributed MQTT messaging broker, it can support up to million level of concurrent MQTT connections. It can be used for connecting to any devices that support MQTT protocol, and it can also be used for delivering message from server side to client.

How many products in EMQ X?

EMQ X totally has 3 products.Introduction - 图1 (opens new window) Different products support different level of connections, features and services etc.

  • EMQ X Broker: EMQ X open source version, supports the popular IoT protocols, such as MQTT, CoAP and LwM2M. It supports 100k level concurrent MQTT connections.
  • EMQ X Enterprise: EMQ X enterprise version. It is based on the open source version, and adds data persistence (support Redis, MySQL, MongoDB or PostgreSQL), data bridge to Kafka, LoRaWAN support, EMQ X monitoring, Kubernetes deployment etc. It supports 1M level concurrent MQTT connections.
  • EMQ X Platform: EMQ X Platform version is based on the Enterprise version，and support 10M level concurrent MQTT connections. We provide consulting service for complex IoT platforms, such as cross data center solutions. All kinds of services building an IoT platform can be provided, such as consulting, training, architect design, customized development, platform implementation, testing and operation.

What’s EMQ X authentication and it’s use scenario?

Tags: Auth

When a client connects to EMQ X server, EMQ X can authenticate it in different ways. It includes following 3 approaches,

  • Username and password: Per every MQTT client connection, which can be configured at the server, only by passing with correct username and password, the client connection can be established.

  • ClientID: Every MQTT client will have a unique ClientID, and a list of ClientIds can be configured in server, and only ClientIds in the list can be authenticated successfully.

  • Anonymous: Allows anonymous access.

Besides using the configuration file (to configure authentication), EMQ X can also use database and integration with external applications, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, HTTP and LDAP.

What’s Hook? What’s the use scenario?

Tags: WebHook

Hook is an interface provided by EMQ X, which will be triggered when a connection, session or message is established/delivered. EMQ X provides hooks listed in below, which allows user to save these triggered events to database, and user can conveniently query all kinds of information, such as client connect, disconnect.

  • client.connected: client online
  • client.disconnected: client offline
  • client.subscribe: client subscribes topics
  • client.unsubscribe: client unsubscribes topics
  • session.created: session was created
  • session.resumed: session is resumed
  • session.subscribed: after session subscribe topic
  • session.unsubscribed: after session unsubscribe topic
  • session.terminated: session is terminated
  • message.publish: MQTT message is publish
  • message.delivered: MQTT message is delivered
  • message.acked: MQTT message is acknowledged
  • message.dropped: MQTT message is dropped

What’s mqueue? How to use mqueue in EMQ X?

Tags: Message Queue

mqueue is message queue stored in session during the message publish process. If the clean session is set false in mqtt connect packet, then EMQ X would maintain session for the client which conneced to EMQ X even the client has been disconnected from EMQ X. Then the session would receive messages from the subscribed topic and store these messages into mqueue. And when the client online again, these messages would be delivered to client instantly. Because of low priority of qos 0 message in mqtt protocol, EMQ X do not cache qos 0 message into mqueue. However, the mqueue could be configured in emqx.conf, if this entry has been configured as zone.$name.mqueue_store_qos0 = true, the qos0 mesage would been stored into mqueue, too. mqueue has limit size, it would be configured with zone.external.max_mqueue_len to determine the number of messages cached into mqueue. Notice that these messages are stored in memory, so please do not set the mqueue length to 0 (0 means there is no limit for mqueue), otherwise it would risk running out of memory.

What’s WebSocket? When to use Websocket to connect EMQ X?

Tags: WebSocket

WebSocket is a full-duplex communication protocol based on HTTP protocol, user can realize dual direction communications between browser and server. Through Websocket, server can push message to web browser. EMQ X provides support of WebSocket, user can realize pub to topics and sub to topic from browsers.

What’s shared subscription, and it’s use scenario?

Tags: Shared Subscription Pub/Sub

Shared subscription is a new feature of MQTT 5.0 specification. Before the feature was introduced in MQTT 5.0 specification, EMQ 2.x already supported the feature as non-standard MQTT protocol. In general, all of subscribers will receive ALL message for the subscribed topics, while clients that subscribe the same topic will receive the message with round-robin way, so one message will not be delivered to different clients. By this way, the subscribers can be load-balanced.

Shared subscription is very useful in data collection and centralized data analysis applications. In such cases, number of data producers is much larger than consumers, and one message is ONLY need to be consumed by once.

What is off-line message?

Tags: Retain

Usually an MQTT client receives messages only when it is connected to an EMQ X, if this client is off-line, it will not receive messages. But if a client has a fixed ClientID, and it connects to the broker with clean_seesion = false, the broker will store particular message for it when it is off-line, if the Pub/Sub is done at certain QoS level (broker configuration). These messages will be delivered when this client is reconnected.

Off-line message is useful when the connection is not stable, or the application has special requirements on QoS.

What is Subscription by Broker? And its use scenario?

Tags: Subscription by Broke

Usually an MQTT client has to subscribe to the topics expressly by itself, if it wants to receive the messages under these topics. Subscription by Broker means that the broker can subscribe to particular topics for a client without client’s interaction. The relation of such clients and their topics to be subscribed to is stored at broker side.

Using of Subscription by Broker can ease the management of massive client, and save the computational resource and bandwidth on device.

Tip

Currently this feature is available in the EMQ X Enterprise edition.

What is the usage of system topics? What system topics are available?

Tags: System Topic

The system topics have a prefix of $SYS/. Periodically, EMQ X publishes system messages to system topics, these messages include system status, statistics of MQTT, client’s online/offline status and so on.

Here are some examples of system topics, for a complete list of system topic please refer to EMQ X document:

  • $SYS/brokers: List of nodes in cluster
  • $SYS/brokers/${node}/clients/${clientid}/connected: this message is published when a client connects
  • $SYS/broker/${node}/stats/connections/count: Number of connections on a node
  • $SYS/broker/${node}/stats/sessions/count: Number of sessions on a node