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Connecting to our VTN

This article describes how to connect your VEN to our VTN. It assumes you have a basic understanding of OpenADR. If you don’t, we suggest you read OpenADR at Voltus first.

Pre-requisites:

  • You sent us a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) and received a signed certificate. OpenADR uses mTLS for authentication. See Getting a TLS Certificate for OpenADR.
  • You must have a VEN_ID. This should have been agreed upon during the OpenADR registration process. Otherwise, reach out to api-support@voltus.co.

Configuration Options:​

You should configured your VEN with the following information in mind:

  1. The VTN root URL will be: https://openadr.voltus.co/vtn/<VEN_ID>.
  2. The full URL for the EiEvent endpoint is https://openadr.voltus.co/vtn/<VEN_ID>/OpenADR2/Simple/EiEvent.
  3. The venID field in the oadrRequestEvent payload must be equivalent to the VEN_ID. Every character must match exactly or your request will be rejected.
  4. Your VEN should use:
    1. the public certificate your received from voltus during the CSR process
    2. the private key you used to generate the CSR

Your VEN is expected to make POST requests regularly to receive dispatches. We recommend a 1 minute polling interval.

your VEN should be sending requests that looks something like this:

POST https://openadr.voltus.co/vtn/<VEN_ID>/OpenADR2/Simple/EiEvent

<ns3:oadrRequestEvent xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/ns/energyinterop/201110/payloads" xmlns:ns2="http://docs.oasis-open.org/ns/energyinterop/201110" xmlns:ns3="http://openadr.org/oadr-2.0a/2012/07">
  <eiRequestEvent>
    <requestID>UNIQUE_REQUEST_ID</requestID>
    <ns2:venID>VEN_ID</ns2:venID>
  </eiRequestEvent>
</ns3:oadrRequestEvent>

After deploying your VEN, you should expect to see 200 OK responses showing no dispatches.

Congratulations! You’re ready to schedule a communications test.

Making Requests Outside a VEN​

Since openADR runs over HTTP, you can use cURL or other command line tools to make requests to our VTN. We do not recommend using this method for receiving dispatches, but it can be useful for debugging.

You can paste the following command into your terminal. You’ll need to:

  • install cURL
  • Place your public certificate and private key in the same directory that you execute the command from.
    • Certificate should be named cert.pem
  • Private key should be named cert.key
  • Replace both instances of VEN_ID with your VEN ID
curl --cert cert.pem --key cert.key  --data '<ns3:oadrRequestEvent xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/ns/energyinterop/201110/payloads" xmlns:ns2="http://docs.oasis-open.org/ns/energyinterop/201110" xmlns:ns3="http://openadr.org/oadr-2.0a/2012/07"><eiRequestEvent><requestID>12345</requestID><ns2:venID>VEN_ID</ns2:venID></eiRequestEvent></ns3:oadrRequestEvent>' --url https://openadr.voltus.co/vtn/VEN_ID/OpenADR2/Simple/EiEvent