Clients

5 min

A client is a single live connection to the message broker in Litmus Unify. The Clients page lists those connections and lets you open any one of them to see what it is subscribed to and what it has been refused.

Clients and accounts are not the same thing. An account is the credential. A client is one connection made with that credential. Several clients can connect under one account, which is why the Accounts page carries a # Of Clients column.

Access Clients UI

To access the Clients page:

Navigate to MQTT > Clients.

Clients list

Column	Description
Client ID	Identifier the client sent when it connected. Select it to open Client Details.
Account	Account the client authenticated with. The account's rules decide what this client can publish and subscribe to.
Type	Type of the account behind the connection: General or Litmus.
IP	Source address and port the client connected from
Enabled	Whether the account behind the client is enabled
Last Seen	Time of the client's most recent activity in UTC.

Select Refresh to update the list. Use the search box to filter by client ID or account.

Client details

Select a Client ID to open Client Details. The page has four tabs.

Tab	Description
Client Info	Connection facts for this client. See the Client info table below.
Subscribed Topics	Topic filters the client has subscribed to
Published Topics	Topics the client has published to
Rejected Topics	Topics the broker refused. Look here first when a client is connected and no messages are processesed.

Client info

Field	Description
Connected	true while the client holds an open connection to the broker
Last Seen	Time of the client's most recent activity in UTC
Protocol Level	MQTT version the client connected with, such as 3.1.1 or 5.0. Features such as topic aliases and shared subscriptions need 5.0.
Remote	Source address and port the client connected from
Username	Account the client authenticated with

Considerations

Client IDs are set by the client not by Unify. A device that reconnects with a new random ID each time produces a new row rather than reusing the old one.

Compare Subscribed Topics with Rejected Topics when a client receives some data but not all of it. A subscription can succeed while individual topics under it are refused.

MQTT