Analytical Setup for IoT Central Application
What is IoT?
The IoT or Internet of Things, is the collection of connected physical devices over internet.
However, it is a significant problem to manage and monitor these devices, collect data from them in one location, and produce a business intelligence report. This is where Azure IoT Central comes in handy.
What is IoT Central?
IoT Central is an application platform as a service that minimizes the cost of developing, managing and maintaining the enterprise-grade IOT solutions.
The service offered by Azure IoT central reduces these difficulties and removes roadblocks. It offers an easy way to update and reconfigure your devices through a centralised management system. Additionally, it offers the foundational infrastructure needed to scale IoT systems.
Let’s now get started on the process of creating analytics reports for those devices using Azure IoT central and Azure Data factory.
Although you can create a custom application and link your devices, I’ll just use the logistic application template offered by the IoT itself to set up the analytics portion.
You can follow this tutorial for setting up the same: Tutorial of IoT Connected logistics | Microsoft Docs. Once everything is setup go to the dashboard and verify if all the devices are up and running.
The following step would be to configure the telemetry for the aforementioned application and devices.
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Go to your resource group in azure portal and create a storage account in which you want your telemetry data. Then create a container inside that storage account.
Return to your IoT Central page and select the Data export option. Give your export a name and select the type of data you wish to export.
Click on the new destination, enter the destination name (any name), and choose blob storage as the type. Copy the connection string from the storage account and paste it here. Give the container name that you created in your storage account and click create.
Once the setup is complete and you can see that the export status is healthy, go to your storage account container and verify the telemetry data. It may take up to 10–15 minutes for the data to be reflected in the container.
Now that we have our telemetry data in our blob storage, the next step is to create a business intelligence report on this data.
For this you can follow the steps in this blog which uses Azure Data Factory to process the data and dump into the SQL db which will be the source for Business Intelligence report.
