You can now use Export Jobs to automatically export your sensor measurements from Tools.Valarm.net to various endpoints and file services like:

In this write-up, you’ll learn details on just how to use our Export Jobs software for sending information from your Industrial IoT sensor devices to Google Drive.

You’ll start off by logging into your Valarm Tools Cloud account on Tools.Valarm.net.

Then go to your Device Manager.

Verify which device you’d like to set up your export for. You can see in the screenshot that we’re looking at sensor data from geofenced IoT devices, which we’ll be exporting to a .CSV file on Google Drive.

Make sure you’ve already set up custom column names / nicknames / aliases for your device’s sensor fields before continuing with the Export Job software features.

When you’re ready to set up your Export Job go to your Device Manager page and click the Export Jobs button on the left, which is highlighted with the arrow in the screenshot you see here.

If this is your 1st time on your Export Job page then you’ll see that you don’t hae any Export jobs set up yet.

First off you’ll need to confirm and link your Google Drive account to Tools.Valarm.net.

This configures Valarm Tools Cloud with Google so you can automatically make and save a new file on your Google Drive with your IoT sensor data.

Click the button to Authorize Google Drive then follow the steps to sign in a verify your Google Drive account.

After you’ve verified your Google Drive account, you’ll notice that your account is now linked and you have the option to disconnect your link at any time.

Now that we’re able to save your sensor measurements to Google Drive, click the button to create a new Export Job so we can set up your data export.

After you click to create a new Export Job, you’ll see your window for making and customizing your new Export Job.

You can configure your Export Job to fit your organization’s custom needs.

To get started, make sure you give your export job a name and a description. This way you, your teams, and anyone at your organization can quickly and easily be reminded about what this job does and why you made it.

Next up, under Data Generation, choose a Schedule for how often you’d like to run your Export Job. You can select Manual if you’d like to run it as often as you need by manually clicking the Run Now button.

Or you can set up scheduled Data Export times. Depending on your account status (contact us if you need to upgrade your Valarm Tools account for more export time options), you’ll have various options like hourly or daily exports. Whether you’re monitoring water, air, hydro, or other assets in the field, you’ll want to select your appropriate time zone for your measurements.

Note that your Export Job scheduled times are ‘on the hour’ based on UTC time. Thus ‘Daily’ means at midnight UTC, whatever time that may be wherever you are. Twice-daily is at noon and midnight in UTC. Weekly is Saturday night at midnight UTC time. Remember that you can select ‘Manual’ if you wish to trigger the job manually whenever you want it to run.

Then select the Time Zone (e.g., Pacific, East Coast, South, Texas, Georgia, Mountain, Central, or any other) you’d like to be used for your exported sensor measurements.This timezone will be used to render your timestamps in the exported data, as well as to name the output file if you choose a file name format with a time stamp. It will also be used when specifying a query time-span for Manual triggered jobs.

If you’re running a manual export job, use the calendars to select a From and To Date that will be used to decide which sensor data is put in your output file. You’ll input a date range to be used for the query when running a ‘Manual’ triggered job.

Under source type you can select if you’d like to export data from a single device. You’ll also have other options here like device groups.

Click the select button under Source and use the drop down menu to choose your device you’d like touse for your output data.

For your Output Format, you can choose your favorite file type:

Under Output Columns you’ll choose your custom sensor field names group. If you haven’t already done this, you’ll need to set up custom aliases and nicknames (HowTo Tutorial here) for your fields that you want to output in your export job.

You have the option to set up Threshold Filtering if you’d like. Click the Enable checkbox if want to configure it. Your Export Threshold Filtering allows you to set logical comparator threshold values that each Valarm sensor Event record must satisfy in order to be included in the exported data. The configurable options are identical to Outbound Alerts and other functions which use Thresholds to make decisions about incoming data.

Last up under Data Generation is your sort order. Your data file will include your sensor info according to what you choose here – whether you’d like your sensor measurements to be listed in ascending or descending order according to their timestamps.

The final part of your Export Job configuration is the Output / Destination information.

Since we’re doing a demo of Google Drive export in this blog post, we’ll choose Google Drive as the Storage Service.

You can choose if you’d like to use any type of file compression for your output file, like Zip or Gz. Compression will greatly reduce the size of the exported file, saving significant space on your storage medium while speeding transit time and reducing consumed bandwidth. In most cases, GZ offers the best compression, but Zip is also excellent. The only reason to select ‘None’ is if you are running an automated process against the exported file which absolutely cannot handle a compressed file.

Next up is the Folder / Directory where you’d like to save your export output. Enter a folder (or full path) for writing your exported file(s). Separate folder names with a forward slash ‘/’. Most services (Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive) will allow this folder tree to be created during export, however FTP absolutely requires that this folder/tree already exists on the server, or the export job will fail.

Google Drive is a very special case: if the folder tree already exists on Drive and was not created by Valarm Tools Export, it will be DUPLICATED (yes, Google Drive supports multiple folders and files with identical names in the same folder). To avoid confusion, it’s probably best if you let the Valarm Tools export process create the desired folder/sub-folder tree you specify in this field.

You’ve got a few options for how you’d like to name your file with your File Name Format choices you’ll see in your drop down menu:

  • Device Name & Date Range: A filename will be generated using the name of the Device or Device Group that is the source of the data, and the date/time range of the query.
  • Job Name & Time Stamp: The filename will be generated from the Job Name field of this Export Job and appended with a timestamp for the moment it runs.
  • Prefix & Time Stamp: A prefix you supply in the Filename Prefix field will be combined with the timestamp of the moment the job runs.
  • Static/Fixed: Input the explicit, complete, and exact filename to use for your export. If you leave this field blank, a default filename will be used. Note: Unlike the other filenaming options, this option does NOT append the file ‘format’ extension and/or compression type extensions to the filename. Whatever you enter in the ‘Static/Fixed Filename’ field will be exactly the name of the exported file. If you include characters which are illegal in the output destination, your export may fail.

In this demo tutorial you can see in the screenshot that we’ve chosen Static / Fixed file name format. In the dialog box you’ll type in the exact file name you’d like to use. Remember that we’ve chosen CSV format and ZIP compression, so we’ll need to add .csv.zip to the end of the file name ( e.g., YourValarmData.csv.zip ) so that a computer will automatically know what to do when you double click the file.

There is also a Forced File Overwrite checkbox option for Google Drive Export Jobs. You have this option because Google Drive allows multiple files with the same name to exist, even within the same folder. Checking this box will cause the Export Job to overwrite an existing file with the same name. Note that if multiple files with this name ALREADY exist in the folder, the Export Job will overwrite only the first one it finds.

That’s an overview and description of your options for setting up a Google Drive Export Job. Once you’re satisfied with your settings, click your green Save button.

You’ll see that your Export Job has been created. Since it’s a manual job, you’ll click Run Now when you’re ready and it’ll start chugging away.

After you click Run Now you can refresh the page to see the latest status of your Export Job.

If everything went smoothly as planned, then you’ll see that your export job has Status OK and a date and time under the Last Run field.

Go your Google Drive to verify that everything went according to plan.

In the screenshot you can see that we’ve got a new YourValarmData.csv.zip file in YourValarmDriveFolder on Google Drive. Great success!

Download your file from Google Drive to check that it’s just what you ordered.

If you’ve compressed your Valarm sensor output file, then uncompress or unzip it to see the file inside, which is a CSV file in the demo example you saw above.

When we open our CSV file we see the export file with the sensor data we configured in the menus above.

In the screenshot you see that we’ve successfully used Excel to open our Valarm IoT sensor data output file. Now you can do whatever else you need to do, like data analytics, visualization, or other business intelligence operations that need an input file. You can use the Valarm Export Job scheduler and then configure scripts to automatically grab your latest IoT sensor data and do what your organization needs to do. This was a big software feature request from our customers that makes it easier for organizations to do backups, automatically generate webpages, run scripts and perform other analytics.

The other types of exports like Dropbox, Amazon S3, FTP, and Microsoft OneDrive, are a similar process. We’ll be documenting those export jobs in step by step detail in the coming weeks. And please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at Info@Valarm.net if you, your teams, and your organization need an additional data output destination to be supported.

That should get you started with your Export Jobs software feature on Tools.Valarm.net. Hope that helps.