I am trying to understand and try out the IoT Service Stack on Microsoft Azure. When reading through documentations and blogs i came across the Microsoft Azure Digital Twins and Microsoft Azure IoT Central service.
But what i didnt understand is:
What is the difference between Azure Digital Twins and Azure IoT Central?
When to use what?
Run combined? Is there any scenario for this or is there a need to use both in parallel? Any scanario for this?
Azure Digital Twins
https://azure.microsoft.com/de-de/products/digital-twins/
Azure IoT Central
https://azure.microsoft.com/de-de/products/iot-central/#overview
You could write a lot about the differences between these products, because they serve a different purpose.
Azure IoT Central is a Software as a Service application that allows you to register, manage and control devices. It stores the device state and provides bi-directional communication between the application and the devices. It's based on Azure IoT Hub for communication and Device Provisioning Service for device registration.
Azure Digital Twins (ADT) is a Platform as a Service offering that allows you to model anything using the Digital Twin Definition Language. While this language is also used in IoT Central to create device templates, the language can be used in ADT to model anything from buildings to people. ADT is used to create a graph-based information model that can be updated through the API. So if you want to include device data, you will need IoT Central or IoT Hub and write code to connect it to ADT. You can use any other data that you have and do the same. It's not limited to IoT devices.
In short, use IoT Central if you want a SaaS platform to manage devices and display telemetry. Use ADT to create a graph-based data collection using any input data you want.
Is there any scenario for this or is there a need to use both in parallel? Any scanario for this?
ADT needs information from a source. This could very well be IoT Central. You can export telemetry from IoT Central and populate the graph. There is no standard way of doing this.
Related
I have a system with IoT Hub to ingests events from devices and Device Provisioning Service to provision devices. IoT Hub C# SDKs are used for the management of device tags and desired properties (IoT Hub device twins), and to invoke direct methods or schedule jobs.
Recently I've been experimenting with Azure IoT Central. While I don't plan to use it, I've found Digital Twins (that are being used on Azure IoT Central) to offer a very good way of managing IoT devices and I would like to emulate the same kind of functionality and capabilities on my IoT system.
The high-level architecture of IoT Central does not seem to indicate the services or logic used to manage Digital Twins.
As far as I understand, there are two ways you can start using Digital Twins:
Plug and Play Digital Twins
Azure Digital Twins service
Question - is Azure IoT Central purely based on Plug and Play Digital Twins and/or does it also use Azure Digital Twins service?
Yes, IOT Central is purely based on plug and play Digital Twins
plug and play Digital Twins enables solution builders to integrate IoT devices with their solutions without any manual configuration.
Azure Digital Twins can be used to design a digital twin architecture that represents actual IoT devices in a wider cloud solution, and which connects to IoT Hub device twins to send and receive live data.
Reference link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-develop/overview-iot-plug-and-play
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/digital-twins/overview#:~:text=What%20is%20Azure%20Digital%20Twins%3F%201%20Azure%20Digital,solution.%203%20Service%20limits.%20...%204%20Terminology.
IoT Central and Azure Digital Twin (ADT) are different, one is an aPaaS or application platform service while other is PaaS offering. IoT Central does not use ADT but the service can be integrated via the extensibility features of IoT Central, similar to PowerBI or custom web pages.
What is common to both is the use of open standard device modeling language called DTDL (https://github.com/Azure/opendigitaltwins-dtdl/blob/master/DTDL/v2/dtdlv2.md). It is based on Json-ld format and can be used in any IoT solution, not just Azure. This is what allows IoT Central application to understand device capabilities and automatically render related charts and control options (PnP)
ADT on other hand allows modeling and creating instances of large physical environments including but not limited to IoT devices and their relationships. The relationships between entities allows rich contextualization which is not possible with device centric view in IoT.
Not sure you're the right audience but I'll try my luck. Trying to check where I can purchase a simple IoT device that can be connected to IoT azure HUB and later also Connected Field Service (Dynamics 365 field service) for demonstration and POC.
I was thinking of something as simple as a flood controller? Anyone have an idea where I can get such a device?
Thank you AshokPeddakotla-MSFT posting your suggestions as answer to help other community members.
Using Water level Sensors, we might be able to predict the floods.
Below are highlights of how the solution can be built .
Microsoft Azure IoT Hub enabled a highly secure and reliable communication to ingest stormwater levels over an Firstnet LTE wireless connection. The team used Azure IoT Hub to provision, authenticate, and manage the two-way communication to the sensors.
SAS Analytics for IoT combined streaming sensors or gauges and weather data for real-time scoring, dashboarding, and historical reporting.
SAS Visual Analytics provided interactive dashboard, reports, business intelligence, and analytics. The dashboard is integrated with ESRI ArcGIS for additional geographic analysis and data visualization.
Microsoft Azure Logic Apps seamlessly integrated with Salesforce and other third-party applications.
Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics provides data warehousing for Big Data analytics.
Complete solution is available here
Reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/field-service/developer/connected-field-service-architecture, https://www.floodsafety.com/national/life/statistics.htm#biblio
I am not understanding when Azure IoT Hub can be preferred over Azure IoT Central. From the readings done so far, IoT central seems better over all the aspects.
Anybody can explain me where are the situations where IoT hub is better than IoT Central?
Thanks
There is no definitive answer to that question, neither are "better", but most of the times one will fit your use case more than the other.
If you want a complete, managed way of connecting devices to the cloud and create dashboards (within the product's limits), a Software as a Service solution like Azure IoT Central can be a match. Think about the requirements of the project you're looking to do, and if it's all supported by IoT Central, go for it! If there are some features you can build by leveraging data export from IoT Central, it might still be a great fit.
If you want to build bi-directional communication and device registration for IoT devices into your own cloud platform, IoT Hub comes into play. Maybe you need better control of the data, or maybe the data insights you need aren't supported by IoT Central. There are a lot of cases where it might not be the best choice. IoT Hub gives you a lot more flexibility that you can use to create almost any IoT scenario.
Both are not directly comparable, there are specific advantages of IoT Central which you may need to consider.
IoT Hub is a PaaS service which can be used with other services to create an IoT solution while IoT Central is IoT Application platform which can be used as-is or extended via companion application. Even addressing basic functionality in IoT Central you will need over dozen other services and you own responsibility to design, manage and administer the orchestration yourself.
IoT Central internally uses multiple IoT Hubs (HA/DR) and bunch of services to bring the functionality that you see in the application. This includes App Service to host the UX, Rules Engine, Fast Storage, API layer, Data Export, RBAC, in-app Multi-tenancy , etc. etc. The key advantages you get -
Full featured IoT solution with high availability, security, scalability that is available in < 10 secs under 99.9% SLA
Simplification, easy to connect any device or simulate basic capabilities using the built-in plug-n-play support. Just select any device from the pnp catalog and try it out even before purchasing the devices.
Create user or app level dashboards with device specific views. Device specific view can be auto-generated with PnP devices.
Rule creation, alerting and integration with other applications via Logic Apps, Functions
Data Export functionality to Event Hub, Service Bus, Blob Storage or Web hooks
Rich Job's interface allowing updating device configurations or firmware
RBAC in combination with Organizations allow giving specific permissions to user.
The big advantage is all this is available with a very simpler per device per month pricing that starts as low as 8 cents per device per month ($2 a year) + additional messages https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/iot-central/
In general unless you already have UX, Storage, Rules engine, etc. elements required for IoT Solution and need to add IoT Hub to ingest and manage IoT devices it will make more sense to start with IoT Central and build with it. It will save time, efforts and you can focus on specific differentiation than build the underlying plumbing and owning the management and sustenance. It is difficult to come to that price point given the high cost of cloud engineers required to support and maintain it.
It is recommended that all customers begin their IoT journey with our aPaaS offering Azure IoT Central. IoT Central is a ready-made environment for IoT solution development. As an aPaaS offering it is built to simplify and accelerate IoT solution assembly and operations, by preassembling PaaS services from the IoT Platform (including IoT Hub and the IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service) and across Azure. A customer that starts with IoT Central builds valuable expertise regardless of whether they go to production with IoT Central, or later build a custom solution to meet complex business needs using PaaS services. To learn more about onboarding to Azure IoT check out this documentation: https://aka.ms/azureiotarch and stay tuned for a session at Microsoft Ignite Nov3-4th Entitled Onboarding to Azure IoT
So, I am working on an IoT solution on Azure, we have been using a partner solution where we had the partner's devices linked to his cloud solution that exposes the data to us Via REST services. Right now we want to have our own IoT Cloud Solution on Azure.
At first, I am planning to build a Bridge between our IoT Solution and the partner's cloud solution via its REST Services that will link to our IoT Hub in order to ingest the data to our cloud.
Also, the data will not be only telemetry data but we'll have to send commands as well to those devices.
My question: I would like to know what would be the appropriate technology/solution to use a gateway (Data Grid, Azure Function, Azure WebJob)
The numbers in the picture represent the step that I am considering to tackle this problem.
1- First we are implementing an Application gateway that will have to get the data from the partner's system and sending commands to their system. It will allow us to first build the other components of our system and make sure that it can handle what is in place right now.
2- Second, the partner's devices will connect directly to a device gateway that is connected to our IoT Hub. In this case, we will not be using the gateway made in 1 anymore.
3- Finally, we will have our own devices connected to our IoT Hub, the partner's devices will always be connected to our IoT Hub via the gateway built in 2.
Let me try to answer your questions in the order you have asked.
For application gateway, where you are trying to pull data through
REST, you can use Azure functions and then you use Cosmos DB or any
storage to save data. I see , after getting device data from Partner
network, you are routing it to IoT-Hub (I would not say, its
incorrect), however once we pull data through Rest, we can directly
put into DB. So my Answer is to use Azure functions to pull data
from Partner solutions and put into DB.
If partner device is capable of running Azure IoT sdks or can be
provisioned to send data to IoT Hub directly, this will ease lot of
things and you would be able to send D2C and C2D messages easily.
further, here you can route data to DB by using configuration from
IoT Hub.
For your devices you can use IoT Hub Directly or can use Azure
IoT Edge (device gateway as you pointed ), both are fine , depends
on use case and also if we want to do some edge computation or
analytics at device side. And one important suggestions, use Azure
functions where ever you find that you have to integrate devices
data through Rest. Most cost effective in such scenarios.
Let me know if it clears your doubts.
After some time working on the subject, I did implement an AZURE Function app for the following reasons :
Supports Continuous Deployment and Integration Even though Azure Functions is serverless architecture, it still supports Continuous Deployment and Continuous Integration
Capabilities for implementing code - Being event-driven, the application platform has capabilities to implement code triggered by events occurring in any third-party service or on-premise system.
Compute-on-demand: This delivery model ensures that computing resources are available to the users as per their demand.
I have also used Azure Table Storage as database storage technology.
I am looking for advice as to the best way to send data from multiple devices to IoT central.
To explain, I will be deploying 3-6 IoT connected microprocessors that will send data from multiple attached sensors to IoT central.
I will be doing this at just one location at first but eventually will be deploying these sensor networks at multiple locations. Each of these locations will need to have a personalized dashboard to view their sensor network data.
I am looking for any advice as to the best method to send this data to IoT central.
Thank you for the help.
Azure IoT Central recently released Device bridge which is an open-source solution that can be used to connect Sigfox, Particle, The Things Network, and other clouds to your Azure IoT Central app. You can access the open source solution from Github.