IoT design Architecture

Hi,

I’m fairly new to the IoT concepts but have a good IT infrastructure and a basic programming background. My employer is planning to commission 2 LoRaWan ttn gateways to start deploying sensors in the field to capture and send alerts (bins, bbq, door open/close, temperature & humidity).

In order to understand how this all works, I acquired a TTN kickstarter kits and got a gateway and a node configured. The sensor/node is now sending data and I have configured a payload function to decode the data.

I understand that TTN keeps data for up to 7 days. Under application on the TTN portal and then under device there is an integration option. However, it doesnt seem to work. Has anyone else experienced this behaviour? Is this where you select a cloud based solution for data storage and analytics(Azure IoT hub, AWS, IBM Watson, etc)?

Any specific documentation on this?

Are we to expect the company selling the sensor/node to provide payload functions to decode the data?

Regards,
Shayan

did you see these docs ? https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/applications/