MQTT & IoT Ingestion

New here? Start with the Quickstart to launch Icelake locally and ingest your first reading in 5 minutes.

Icelake speaks MQTT natively — you point a source at any MQTT broker, Icelake subscribes to a topic, decodes each message, and lands the result on S3 as Parquet. No Node-RED, no Telegraf, no gateway service in between.

You manage MQTT sources from the Icelake admin dashboard under Data In → MQTT Sources. Each source captures broker credentials, a topic pattern, and a parsing mode.

When to use which mode

Mode	Best for	What Icelake does
Generic JSON	Sensors that publish a flat JSON object with numeric fields	Maps every numeric field to a metric, every string field to a label
TTN LoRaWAN	Devices registered on The Things Network	Auto-extracts device EUI, RSSI/SNR, decoded payload fields. See the TTN guide for step-by-step setup

Walkthrough: a temperature sensor in 3 minutes

This example uses Eclipse Mosquitto as a public test broker and a simple mosquitto_pub call, but the shape is the same for any broker you own.

1. Add the MQTT source

In the admin dashboard, go to Data In → MQTT Sources → Add Source and fill in:

Field	Value
Name	`demo-temperature`
Broker URL	`mqtts://test.mosquitto.org:8883`
Topic	`icelake/demo/+/temperature`
Parsing Mode	Generic JSON
Username / Password	leave blank (public broker)

Click Test connection, then Save. Icelake subscribes immediately.

2. Publish a sample message

mosquitto_pub \
-h test.mosquitto.org -p 8883 --capath /etc/ssl/certs \
-t 'icelake/demo/kitchen/temperature' \
-m '{
  "temperature": 21.4,
  "humidity": 48,
  "device_id": "sensor-kitchen-01",
  "location": "kitchen"
}'

3. See it land

Within a few seconds the new dataset appears in Data Sets in the admin dashboard. You can also ask MasterMind:

“Show me the last ten temperature readings from the kitchen sensor”

or query by SQL:

SELECT timestamp, temperature, humidity, device_id
FROM metrics
WHERE metric_name = 'temperature' AND location = 'kitchen'
ORDER BY timestamp DESC
LIMIT 10;

Broker endpoints

Icelake’s managed service also exposes its own MQTT broker, so devices can publish directly without a third-party broker:

Protocol	Endpoint	Notes
MQTTS (TLS)	`mqtts://api.icelake.eu:8883`	Recommended for production
MQTT v5	`mqtt://api.icelake.eu:8885`	Plain TCP, MQTT 5.0 features

Use your client ID as the MQTT username and your API key (ilk_…) as the password. Topics follow the pattern {tenant_id}/v1/devices/{device_id}/sensors/{sensor_id}/telemetry.

Topic patterns & wildcards

Standard MQTT wildcards apply:

+ — single-level wildcard (matches one topic segment)
# — multi-level wildcard (matches everything beneath, must be last)

Examples:

sensors/#                          — all sensor topics
sensors/+/temperature              — temperature from every sensor
home/+/+/state                     — any state topic two levels down
v3/my-app@ttn/devices/+/up         — TTN uplinks for one application

Tenant isolation & security

Every MQTT source binds to exactly one API key. Data ingested from that source is scoped to the corresponding tenant — queries, dashboards, and retention policies all respect the boundary. To isolate environments or teams, create one API key (and one MQTT source) per tenant.

The Things Network — LoRaWAN-specific setup with auto-parsing
Admin Dashboard — manage sources, datasets, and API keys
Home Assistant — ship smart-home entities via the HACS integration