Using Spotflow with Your Existing MQTT Broker
How to collect logs, metrics, and crash reports through your own cloud MQTT broker (such as AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub, or HiveMQ) without adding a second MQTT connection from the device.
Many IoT deployments already have a cloud MQTT broker (AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub, HiveMQ, or a self-hosted broker) handling communication between devices and backend services. Adding Spotflow observability to such a deployment does not require a second MQTT connection from the device. Opening a separate connection carries real costs on cellular and constrained hardware: additional radio time, extra memory for a second TLS session, and a second set of credentials to provision and rotate. Instead, the Spotflow device module can package telemetry and publish it to dedicated topics on your existing broker. The Spotflow MQTT Subscriber connects to those topics from the cloud side, and your devices, your broker infrastructure, and your existing backend services remain unchanged.
This integration path is currently in development. The architecture described here reflects the planned design. If you are evaluating this approach for your deployment or would like to participate in early access, contact us at hello@spotflow.io or reach out on Discord.
The device maintains a single MQTT connection to your broker, exactly as it does today. The Spotflow device module publishes telemetry (logs, metrics, and crash reports) to a dedicated topic prefix (for example, spotflow/) within that broker. Your application continues publishing to its own topics on the same connection. The two streams share the connection but remain logically separate.
On the cloud side, the Spotflow MQTT Subscriber connects to your broker. Most enterprise MQTT brokers support topic-level access control, which means you can grant Spotflow read access to the spotflow/ prefix only, with no visibility into any other topic. Once the Spotflow MQTT Subscriber receives telemetry, it processes and stores it in the Spotflow platform, and the data becomes available in the Spotflow Portal exactly as it would in a standard Spotflow integration: log search, metric dashboards, crash report analysis, alerts, and firmware management. Once telemetry reaches the Spotflow MQTT Subscriber, it is processed and available in the Spotflow Portal near-realtime.
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