OTA Best Practices

Introduction & Purpose

This guide summarizes operational standards and best practices for conducting Over-The-Air (OTA) updates via the Ayla platform, focusing on delivering updates reliably, supporting various update strategies (scheduled, staged, bulk), monitoring progress, and ensuring traceability.

Best Practices

OTA at scale: Only use Command Center for the firmware updates for better user experience instead of Legacy OTA, since it enables the customers to orchestrate changes across their fleet of devices seamlessly and efficiently, while providing the visibility, scalability, and flexibility.
Maximum Devices per Command Center Job: Limit each Command Center OTA job to a maximum of 10,000 devices (as of 12th May 2025). Ayla Engineering is working to increase this limit. Note that the system does not restrict the number of devices in the filter.
Stage Run: Command Center Stage Run feature allows the customers to upgrade and test a small subset of devices before performing OTA at scale. Always use stage run to mitigate the potential damage caused by erroneous software updates. As of 12th May 2025, the stage run feature is available only for Host OTA. Ayla Engineering is working on supporting this feature for Ayla module OTA.
Job Concurrency: While OTA does not restrict the number of concurrent jobs, avoid starting multiple jobs at the same time. Ensure there is a 10-minute gap between each job start.
Retry Policy: Limit failed retries to 3, especially for Ayla digital certificate update loads.
Rapid start/stop jobs: Avoid rapidly starting and stopping of the command center jobs. This can cause issues due to the asynchronous nature of the system.
Device Search Filters: Although Command Center provides multiple filter options to narrow down target devices for OTA jobs, for better performance, we recommend the below approaches:

Filter Type	Use Case	How to Apply
Device List	Select this to run a job without stage-based processing.	Use the “create using device list” option and input DSNs directly.
Dynamic Search (create using query)	Filter devices based on activation date and connection status.	Select “create using query” → “Lifecycle/Status” and define criteria. Click on the “Refresh” or “preview filter” button to get the estimated device count.

Additional OTA Best Practices

Phased Rollout: Begin with 5–10% of field devices, verify success, then proceed with larger blocks (100–1,000 devices).
Monitor Success: Ensure each OTA job completes successfully before proceeding to the next batch and consider re-queuing the devices, if required.

Summary Table

Best Practice	Recommendation/Limit
Max devices per Command Center job	10,000 (post 05/12 TBD)
Throttling (OEM level)	1,000
Max jobs in parallel	No strict limit, but stagger job starts
Stage run feature	To process devices in batch
Max retries	3

Suggested Command Center Flow

From the Command Center pane of the OEM dashboard, navigate to “Create Device Job.“
Create Command Center job using below configurations:

Define the filter criteria as follows:

Click on “Refresh“ or “Preview Filter Query Results“ to get the estimated device count in the job before creating the job.
Carefully review all the values before the job is created: