Live Guard

Live Guard

High availability and infrastructure

Live Guard is an umbrella term covering the two purposes for which it was created; high availability and store infrastructure (I/O). Live Guard High Availability ensures we provide the most functionalities possible based on your current network situation. Live Guard I/O makes your in-store devices accessible by EVA.

For your basic understanding, we will first cover how it works and then go over the configuration in detail.

Live Guard architecture

A full-fledged Live Guard setup consists of three necessary parts;

EVA Cloud
Watchtower
Live Guard module

We provide you with EVA Cloud and we build the Live Guard module into our applications, you just have to set up Watchtower devices in your stores.

EVA Cloud

This one speaks for itself. In order to be able to connect to EVA, you need an instance of EVA to connect to in the first place.

Watchtower

Watchtower is a physical, on-premise device that can communicate with EVA Cloud and the Live Guard module in our applications. Additionally, it runs a slimmed down, parallel version of EVA which can be used when EVA Cloud is unreachable.

Live Guard module

Live Guard comes with a module that's built in to any application in our App Suite. In fact, it is built in to our SDK. This module is able to cache certain information on the device itself, which can act as a failsafe during local network outages and coincidentally improves performance when certain operations can be performed from memory.

Watchtower I/O

Accessing on-premise devices from the internet generally isn't easy. If it was, none of your devices would really be safe.

Port forwarding is a classical option to open up a 'channel' into your local network to resolve this issue. When our customers first started rolling out EVA in their stores, port forwarding was necessary to grant EVA access to devices such as thermal receipt printers. This method has two downsides though; modern compliancy legislation really does not like port forwarding, and manually forwarding ports is just immensely inefficient when rolling out our software onto a large number of stores.

That's where Watchtower comes into play as an on-premise device designed to function as a gateway between the EVA instance and the in-store devices. More info.

Live Guard Local

We created EVA to provide real-time data across your entire organization. This is possible because all of our front-ends are essentially online instances of our products. This real-time utility does come with a massive downside though; when you are not connected to our services, you are instantly crippled.

Every single action goes through EVA, and when you can't reach EVA, you can't do anything anymore. Not even sell a product that's in stock, to a customer that wants to pay with cash. For retailers, being cut off from possible sales is the biggest problem they could possibly face, so we came up with the best solution we could think of; Live Guard.

Live Guard Local is a backup service which maintains basic store functionality in the rare case where your devices can't reach EVA. Live Guard allows basic store services to be maintained in what we call 'Local mode'. More info.