What is Echo?
Echo is Authentise's program to automatically monitor your printers in real-time. This data is used for both Authentise's Manufacturing Execution System as well as the Machine Analytics tool. The data can also be accessed via our 3Diax API's to create custom workflows.
Technically:
From a network standpoint, Echo is fairly simple. Upon startup, it will attempt to establish a connection to the Authentise cloud. It will request two locations from the cloud to test whether or not proxy configuration is required and whether or not it currently has credentials. It binds to the loopback address, which it uses to communicate with the desktop so that it can get proxy and credential configuration information. Once it has that configuration, it will query our cloud services over https for information about any printers that have been set up and how to communicate with them.
It will then make periodic requests over the local network to these printers. This is usually a status report once every 5 minutes and a historical jobs report once every hour. Each time the communications will happen over a port that is specific to the manufacturer directly to the printer and should last only 1 second or less. When Echo has received the data it requested it will then send that data to our cloud system using HTTPS over port 443. The overall bandwidth requirements are very low - a status report is only a few kilobytes, a job log may get up to 1 megabyte long if the printer has done a large amount of work over several years. In no situation does Echo maintain an open socket that is available over the network.