About beacons with Splunk AR

Beacons are Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices that broadcast their location and associated data to nearby mobile devices. You can make dashboards available to Splunk AR users who are close to a physical location by using beacons with Splunk AR. Splunk AR users can easily relate physical locations to dashboards with beacons. See Use case for beacons for an example of how beacons are useful.

Beacons are a form of hardware that allow Splunk AR users to receive information seamlessly through proximity detection. When a Splunk AR user is close to a beacon, they receive Splunk dashboards associated with that beacon on their mobile device. The user's proximity instigates the data communication, so the user doesn't need to take any action other than approaching the beacon to receive information.

How mobile apps identify beacons and their associated data

A beacon deployment region is characterized by a Universally Unique Identifier (UUID). The UUID identifies a collection of beacons that the user has assigned to the region. Typically, one UUID represents one region of beacons. Each beacon is assigned a major value and a minor value. The pair of major and minor values uniquely identifies each beacon within the UUID region.

Users provide the UUID to Splunk AR and associate data with the beacons. The beacons then broadcast the associated data to the mobile devices located in the UUID region. The following graphic illustrates how the beacons and their associated dashboards are layered under a UUID:

Beacon ranging

Beacons use BLE to broadcast location and information. BLE devices emit low energy Bluetooth signals for long term broadcasting. The transmission power and advertising frequency of a beacon determine its range and battery life. Beacons with a higher transmission power and advertising frequency configuration can broadcast farther. Users can adjust the transmission power and advertising frequency of a beacon according to the manufacturer's configuration process.

Proximity detection

You can see how close a beacon is to you in the Splunk AR app with proximity detection. The distance between your device and the beacon is categorized by three ranges:

Range category	Distance
Immediate	Within centimeters
Near	Within several meters
Far	Farther than 10 meters away

You can identify which data is associated with which location by using proximity detection. As users gets closer to or farther from the beacon, Splunk AR updates the range category in real time.

What's the difference between a beacon and a geofence?

Both beacons and geofences allow Splunk AR users to associate dashboards with a location. Beacons require hardware and provide a higher granularity of proximity distinction. Beacon proximity distinction can have centimeter-level precision. Geofences work best when defining an area as large as a GPS-based location, such as a building.

To learn more about geofences, see Create and use geofences with Splunk AR.

Use case for beacons

Set up beacons with Splunk AR to associate dashboards with particular locations, and proactively present dashboards to Splunk AR users. Here's an example of how location-based data availability is useful.

A telecommunications company dispatches technicians to service cell tower sites. The technician's task is to perform onsite equipment diagnostics and investigate any machinery that seems problematic. Often, obtaining equipment data onsite is a multi-step process: the technician searches for the problematic equipment and contacts IT, and then IT retrieves, interprets, and relays the data back to the technician.

Instead, the company can set up a Splunk AR beacon deployment so that technicians receive dashboards simply by being onsite. The technician approaches the cell tower while using the Splunk AR beacon feature, and notices that a particular dashboard indicates poor equipment health. The technician knows exactly which machine to service because the dashboard is associated with a beacon embedded on the equipment.

See Set up and use beacons to get started with a Splunk AR beacon deployment.