Learn About Telemetry Definition and Action Management

Use the capabilities of Telemetry Definition and Action Management to achieve various business outcomes.

Available in: Lightning Experience

Available in: Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Editions

What is a telemetry definition?

To communicate with systems such as Salesforce and its primary telematics service provider, a connected vehicle can have hundreds of sensors to read and gather values from. Similarly, they can have actuators to perform remote actions in near real time.
Admins can use telemetry definitions to define a logical structure of sensors and, or actuators of a vehicle model. These structures can be used to send a telemetry signal, a data signal that carries telemetry data remotely, from a connected vehicle.
The basis for the telemetry definition design for vehicles is the Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS) which is a widely adopted, open data model created to normalize vehicle data, as defined by The Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance (COVESA). This is to enable data interoperability, reduce data fragmentation, and facilitate collaboration with other industries to accelerate new business opportunities and ecosystem growth.
Telemetry definitions consist of component structures that define the components in the telemetry definition to send signals, represented in a JSON format. Users can capture the changes in a structure in telemetry definition version records.

Admins can configure actions based on the created telemetry definition versions. A telemetry action definition record captures the signals sent to the actuator(s) of a connected vehicle, such as getting the current status of a component, or sending a request to perform a remote action on a component. For example, a customer support rep, on behalf of a customer, wants to send a remote command for unlocking the door for a connected vehicle.
The hierarchical path representing the target component in the telemetry system of a connected vehicle where the action is targeted is the Target Component Path. Each telemetry action definition requires telemetry action definition steps to be defined within step groups to specify these target component paths for carrying out a remote operation, such as a retrieve or a submit operation. For example, the steps for a remote door lock or unlock action for a vehicle could be: i) Fetch the current status of all doors, ii) Apply the modified status by sending instructions to the telemetry service provider as required.
A telemetry action definition step, in turn, requires attributes to define whether that step is supposed to fetch any information or to execute an action, or both. Admins can configure the behavior of this step using telemetry action definition step attributes. For example, IsOpen, IsChildLockActive can be the attributes for a telemetry action definition step corresponding to the door component of a vehicle.

To carry out a remote action, users would need to create a service process and define the custom attributes, generate an Omniscript-based intake form, attach a fulfillment flow and an integration definition for it. But there can be a large number of configurations for a connected vehicle, thus making the manual creation of such service processes a tedious and time-consuming job.
Telemetry Definition and Action Management reduces that mammoth effort by generating service processes based on the defined telemetry definitions and telemetry action definitions through service automation connect APIs.
When a telemetry action definition is activated, all the appropriate data is collected from the corresponding telemetry action definition and the service automation connect APIs are invoked to automatically generate a service process, creating a telemetry action related process record.
Once a service process is generated, users can leverage Unified Catalog to customize the generated process and carry out remote actions using the Action Launcher on a specific Vehicle record page.

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