MQTT Broker

The Collectu hub provides a managed MQTT broker. The service can be used to exchange data between Collectu core instances, to monitor data or to remotely control a Collectu core.

Info
Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a lightweight messaging protocol designed for efficient communication between devices, even in low-bandwidth or unstable network conditions. It follows a publish-subscribe model, where devices (clients) can publish messages to specific topics, and other clients can subscribe to those topics to receive the messages. This makes MQTT ideal for IoT applications, real-time data exchange, and remote monitoring. One of MQTT's key advantages is its scalability—brokers can handle thousands of connected devices efficiently. Its low bandwidth usage and ability to work over secure connections make it a popular choice for modern connected systems.

Security

The managed MQTT broker is hosted between a remote proxy that supports Transport Layer Security (TLS). This means that data sent and received by the broker is encrypted and cannot be accessed by unknown third parties.

MQTT Topics and Access Control

In MQTT, data is exchanged using topics, which act like channels where messages are published and subscribed to. Each client can publish messages to specific topics, and other clients can subscribe to those topics to receive the data.

To ensure privacy and access control, every topic used within the Collectu MQTT broker must be prefixed with the username of the publishing client. Clients can only publish and subscribe to topics that begin with their assigned username, preventing unauthorized access to other users’ data. For example, if a user named user123 wants to send a message, they must use topics such as: user123/sensor/temperature

Other users will not be able to see, subscribe to, or publish messages to topics that do not belong to them. This restriction ensures that data remains secure and isolated between different clients.

Usage

Collectu offers predefined modules to subscribe (inputs.mqtt.collectu_client_1) and publish (outputs.mqtt.collectu_client_1) to the managed Collectu MQTT broker.

The general login information are as follows:

For TLS (TCP)

  • Host: mqtt.collectu.de
  • Port: 8883
  • Username: <your-api-access-token>
  • TLS: has to be enabled, e.g. tls://mqtt.collectu.de
  • Password: is not used, but should not be empty

For Websocket

  • Host: mqtt.collectu.de
  • Port: 443
  • Username: <your-api-access-token>
  • TLS: has to be enabled, e.g. ws://mqtt.collectu.de
  • Password: is not used, but should not be empty
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