Core Concepts

Understanding the building blocks of PEEK: Fleets, Sources, Devices, Schemas, and Alerts.

Fleets

A Fleet is the top-level container in PEEK. It represents a group of devices that you manage together. When you create your account, a default fleet is created for you automatically.

Fleets are the unit of collaboration — you can invite other users to your fleet with different permission levels (see Team & Permissions).

Sources

A Source is a connection point where PEEK receives device messages. Each fleet can have multiple sources. There are two types:

TypeHow It WorksBest For
MQTTPEEK connects to your broker as a read-only subscriberDirect broker access
WebhookYour platform POSTs JSON to a PEEK-generated URLCloud IoT platforms, AWS IoT, Azure

Devices

Devices represent individual IoT endpoints in your fleet. PEEK discovers devices automatically from incoming messages — you never need to register them manually.

Each device tracks:

  • Presence — whether the device is currently online or offline
  • Message rate — how frequently it is sending data
  • Last seen — when the last message was received
  • Friendly name — an optional human-readable label you can set
  • State history — a log of online/offline transitions

Schemas

PEEK automatically detects the structure of your JSON payloads. Rather than storing raw message data, PEEK extracts the field names and types (e.g., temperature: number) and groups messages by their structure.

This gives you visibility into what data your devices are sending without the storage cost of keeping every message. See Schema Detection for details.

Alerts

Alerts are rules you define that trigger when specific conditions are met. PEEK supports 9 alert types ranging from device presence (offline/online) to payload field thresholds. When an alert fires, you receive a notification via email, SMS, or Discord. See Alerts & Notifications.