The future of IoT is inherently visual, so why isn't our tooling? We've seen from very early on that Azure Digital Twins solutions are built on visual mental models, so we've set out to offer visual tooling with developers in mind. Instead of creating visual tooling from scratch, developers can fork and customize the digital-twins-explorer GitHub sample for their solutions. We’ve had such resounding support for this tool that we’ve taken the next step of hosting it in a web application for developers to take advantage of on Day 1. Learning and exploring Azure Digital Twins just got way easier - and even more collaborative.
Build and validate queries
It’s paramount that the queries you’re leveraging in your solution reflect the logic that you’re intending. The Query Explorer lets you intuitively validate these critical queries through both visual and JSON-structured responses, and even lets you save the queries you use often. Leverage features like Query Overlay to view query results in context of a superset graph and Filtering and Highlighting to investigate those results even further.
Prototype and test your digital twins
Your digital twin graph is never static – there are new machines to model, model versions to upgrade and properties being updated all the time to reflect your environment’s state. The Explorer lets you both create twins and relationships from inside the Twin Graph viewer and click into them to modify properties of all types. From creating missing relationships to testing a property-change-triggered event handler, managing properties in the Explorer makes your ad-hoc operations simpler.
Explore your model ontology
Model graphs can be large and complex, especially with more real-world domains being modeled – like parking infrastructure and weather data in a Smart City. Whether you’re authoring your own ontology or leveraging the industry-standard ontologies, the Model Graph viewer helps you understand your ontology at a high level and drill into the models with filtering and highlighting.
Now, more collaborative!
Importing and exporting your digital twin graph has already made it far easier to share the current state of your modeled environment with teammates, but we’ve extended the collaborative nature of the tool. With the hosted Explorer, we’ve enabled linking to environments which lets you share a specific query of your twin graph with teammates that have access to your Azure Digital Twins instance.
Get started
- Launch the Explorer from the Azure Portal – navigate to your Azure Digital Twins instance and select Open Azure Digital Twins Explorer (preview)
- Head directly to explorer.digitaltwins.azure.net
Resources
- Watch the Explorer IoT Show episode
- Learn more in Explorer documentation
- Download the digital-twins-explorer on GitHub and contribute back