Azure IoT services can simplify your IoT development process and empower your organization to achieve more through Digital Transformation. That’s a bold statement to make—what exactly does it mean?
Microsoft services can help you to fast track any portion of your IoT Solution. That may mean maintaining health and stability through IoT Edge metrics, centralizing management of your devices with IoT Central, analyzing data from digital representations of real-world environments using Digital Twins, or simulating solutions with rapid prototyping tools, turning your cell phone into a live telemetry producing IoT device.
These features are here today and ready to service your immediate needs. In fact, many of our product feature updates are driven specifically from feature requests from our communities, which includes users with the need to manage millions of devices. No matter the size of your project, if you are looking for trusted reliable services that can scale to meet your demands, Azure IoT Services are here for you. Let’s take a closer look at some of the latest feature updates from our product teams and how they can benefit your digital transformation journey!
Public preview: IoT Edge Metrics Collector module 1.0.1 release
Published July 19, 2021
You can remotely monitor your IoT Edge fleet using Azure Monitor and built-in metrics integration. To enable this capability on your device, add the metrics-collector module to your deployment and configure it to collect and transport module metrics to Azure Monitor. This can allow you to collect insights into your devices and allow you the capability to monitor health status of in-production field-deployed devices.
IoT Edge Metrics Collector module release 1.0.1 is now available in the Microsoft container registry.
Why you’ll want it:
- It contains .NET June security and reliability updates
- Recommended update for all customers
- Ability to specify Azure Domain to enable sending metrics to Azure government and regional clouds
- Tip: Rolling tags '1.0' and 'latest' have been updated to point to the new version
General availability: Azure IoT Central new and updated features
Published July 15, 2021
Azure IoT Central is an IoT application platform that simplifies the creation and initial setup of IoT solutions, reducing the management burden and operational cost of developing, managing, and maintaining a typical IoT project.
Azure IoT Central connects your IoT devices to the cloud quickly and easily, offering centralized management to reconfigure and update your devices.
A few of the reasons you’ll want to check out the latest updates:
- You can add tiles to your dashboard in a new way, with tile configuration automatically showing only telemetry and property types a selected tile type supports
- IoT Central pages now have responsive UI
- You can now select ‘ALL’ or ‘ANY’ when defining multiple telemetry conditions in the same rule
- Tip: Try the refreshed quickstarts to use the new smartphone app
General availability: Azure Digital Twins plugin for Azure Data Explorer
Published June 24, 2021
Azure Digital Twins enables you to create digital models of assets, places, people, and processes; and then relate these items based on their real-world relationships.
The Azure Digital Twins plugin for Azure Data Explorer is now available, enabling you to combine digital models of your environment with time series data from your devices. Use the plugin to contextualize disparate time series data in Azure Data Explorer by reasoning across Digital Twins and their relationships to gain insights into the behavior of your modeled environments.
Tip: Check out this blog post to see how you can use the plugin to analyze the historical behavior of various portions of a smart energy grid.
General availability: Turn your phone into an IoT device with the new IoT Plug and Play mobile app
Published June 24, 2021
An Azure IoT solution lets you connect your IoT devices to a cloud-based IoT service. Devices send telemetry, such as temperature and humidity and respond to commands such as reboot and change delivery interval. Devices can also synchronize their internal state with the service, sharing properties such as device model and operating system.
Turn your iOS or Android device into an IoT device that seamlessly connects to Azure IoT Central or IoT Hub, showcasing the power and simplicity of IoT Plug and Play. No device modeling experience required.
With this app you’ll be able to:
- Send telemetry from device sensors such as the accelerometer and barometer
- See device properties such as the manufacturer and model number, and update device twins from the cloud
- Execute commands on your device, such as flashing your phone's flashlight, from Azure IoT
- Upload media to Azure Storage, using File Upload, from your device
Learn more: Microsoft Developers featured resources repository on GitHub
This month the Microsoft Developers Featured Resources repository on GitHub is spotlighting what’s new and what’s next in IoT and DevSecOps. Whether you’re an experienced cloud developer or just getting started with IoT, these demos, projects, and training tools will help you develop next-generation IoT solutions today.
Watch and star this resource repo from Microsoft Developers to keep up with the latest versions: Visit the GitHub repo
Paul DeCarlo is a Principal Cloud Developer Advocate for Microsoft and Professor for the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston. His current technology interests focus on Internet of Things, Cloud Applications, and App Development. Additionally, he is an experienced startup founder and on weekends Paul performs as lead vocalist in a Houston area rock band.
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