What it is
Devices report to the network they were registered on — a Sigfox backend, a ChirpStack or TTN server. The systems that actually use those readings — a billing platform, a maintenance dashboard, a customer portal — live somewhere else entirely, and each expects data in its own format.
Wiring those together directly means one integration per pair. Two networks and three consuming systems is six integrations, each with its own retry logic, its own payload decoding, its own failure modes. Add a fourth consumer and you write two more.
The Center is the hub in the middle. You connect each network once and each consuming system once. Every pairing between them becomes configuration.
Left side, right side
The vocabulary matters, because the whole app is built around it.
A source is a left side: where devices live and messages come from. A
sink is a right side: a system that wants the data and receives it. Both are
called integrations in the app — a source is an integration with its
direction set to Source (left), a sink one set to Sink (right).
What the Center actually does to a message
Between arriving and being delivered, a message is:
- Authenticated — the source's adapter checks the payload really came from that network.
- Normalised — a Sigfox callback and a ChirpStack uplink become the same internal shape, so everything downstream is provider-agnostic.
- Matched to a device — the identifier in the payload is resolved to a device you created in the Center.
- Decoded — raw bytes become named readings, if the device's profile has a decoder.
- Filtered by rules — deliver it, drop it, answer it, or hold it.
- Shaped — built into the structure each destination expects.
- Delivered — with retries, and a dead-letter queue if it never succeeds.
The pipeline walks through those steps in detail. The Flow page in the app draws them as a diagram you can click into.
What it is not
Being straight about the boundaries saves you time later.
- It is not long-term storage. Messages are a transient buffer — they are held until delivered, then discarded. If you need history, your sink is what keeps it. Counts survive in Analytics, the message bodies do not.
- It is not where devices are registered. A device exists on its network first. The Center holds a record that points at that registration. It can provision devices onto a network for you, but the network remains the system of record.
- It is not a dashboard for end users. It is an operator's tool. The readings end up in your systems, and those are what your customers look at.