Feature Request: Cellular data usage details

I’ve just recently started working with my Electron board, and when sleep mode support comes out, I’ll be doing more with my Boron. The Particle Console only shows very broad information for our cellular data usage. I hope Particle will consider providing more fine-grained details. Letting us drill down to an hourly level (or at least daily), would be very useful for helping us predict our ongoing data usage.

You know about this functionality, correct? https://docs.particle.io/reference/device-os/firmware/electron/#getdatausage-

Yes, but for a deployed project that’s going to require either using more data to periodically publish usage info, or somehow storing periodic usage data and downloading it later (and, possibly resetting the data periodically). Plus, I’ll have to write more code in order to analyze the collected data.

It seems to me that Particle already has the usage details (used to render the monthly usage graph), and it would be generally useful to all users if they would just expose more details via the Console. That’s why I posted this as a feature request rather than a “how can I track my detailed data usage” question.

Besides, as a developer, I’m naturally lazy! :laughing:

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Got it… I will pass your feature request to the Console product management team.

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+1

Couldn’t agree with this more. Pretty much every IoT project ever will have a standard set of telemetry messages which will get added as the project matures. Most people-- even us professionals-- put off the telemetry part till later because it’s not strictly needed for an MVP, and, well, it takes time and it’s not as sexy as telling your colleagues and investors about an awesome new feature. Of course, on a long enough timeline something will fail catastrophically and then the lack of telemetry means that we don’t even know why it failed. My experience is that every new start up will go through the exact same dumpster fire for the exact same reasons.

The point of this is that identifying and baking in the core telemetry needs for all projects is going to enhance Particle’s value-add. Being able to get granular info on data usage is why we abandoned one data provider in favor of another (a $10k/mo. shift in revenue), so it’s pretty important to keeping costs down.

Thanks a lot, @ParticleD, for passing @dougal’s suggestion along!

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+1

Well I learned something today. You can get more detailed usage data, just not in the Console. https://docs.particle.io/reference/device-cloud/api/#get-data-usage

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Oh, nice! I still think having the data available in the Console would be a great feature, but this API could definitely make creating our own usage dashboard much easier.

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A few notes of interest on this. Cellular data reporting is typically pretty on point for our Electron and E Series 2G/3G Global boards (delays up to an hour is not too far off), but at the moment, such data reporting is significantly more delayed in regards to our Boron 2G/3G Global, Boron LTE, and E Series LTE and should be used with caution. This is something we’re actively working with the MVNO to improve, but in the short term, please be cautious with these.

While it does have its own caveats, it may not be a bad idea to consider usage of Cellular.getDataUsage() function as well for tracking.

Thanks @mstanley, good to know. For what I’d like to know, data usage at a resolution of one day would be fine.

+1