How to tag your IoT Hub Devices

Until now, device twin tags were a bit lame.

Yes, desired and reported properties were much more fun to play with.

But those of you who administer thousands of Azure IoT devices, you really appreciate tags. It’s the only way to control that large amount of devices without losing your head.

Why? Because you first query your devices and then execute jobs on these subsets.

And Microsoft is making use of this feature a lot. You will have to use tags if you want to execute IoT Edge deployments (still in preview) or if you want to use the recently added Automatic Device Management (even newer):

But how do you actually add or alter tags of devices? What tooling is Microsoft providing?

Let’s check out a number of ways to tag and start querying your devices.

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Your Docker container takes care of persisting your SQL Server database

Microsoft has a great solution for persisting your local data collected by the IoT Edge. It’s up to you to get the data in and out of your database. But you have a convenient way of storing your precious information into some kind of persistent storage.

As seen in my previous blog, it’s not that hard to deploy and administer your database.

But how persistent is your database actually? Can you trust Docker for taking care of your data?

In this blog, we try to answer this question.

Administer your SQL Server in Docker

As with many things, you have to do it, to believe it.

The same goes for the Azure IoT Edge solution.

With the new IoT Edge solution, Microsoft provides a platform, both powerful and scalable. It’s based on Docker and logic is put in Docker containers.

And in many presentations, this (correct) picture is used to show the capabilities:

I am already working with the IoT Edge preview quite some time and there is a ‘weak’ spot in the image.

I already marked it in red so it’s not that hard to find.

On several occasions, non-technical people explained the local storage as being a database to persist data from internal logic.

I understand the confusion, but this is just a ‘database’ used by the IoT Edge internals (I assume mostly the Edge Hub module) and it is not accessible by users. I know for sure it’s used for the store-and-forward pattern used to send ‘upstream’ messages to the cloud.

Once a message is routed to be sent to the cloud, it’s first stored by the EdgeHub. If the connection to the Azure IoT Hub cannot be established, the message is stored with a certain retention time ( see its configuration “storeAndForwardConfiguration”: { “timeToLiveSecs”: 7200} ).

So, how can we add local storage to our IoT Edge if we want to do something with custom code and databases, etc.

Well, Microsoft already has written a great piece of documentation here.

There, you can see how you create an SQL Server database both on Linux and Windows containers and you learn how to create a database and a table inside it. Finally, you access it using some Azure function.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into this.

We will look on other  (simpler) ways to work with the database.

Accelerating Azure IoT Device Simulation

At the recent Build, Microsoft announced that the Azure IoT Suites were renamed to Microsoft Azure IoT Solution Accelerators.

“A solution accelerator helps you speed up the development and deployment of your IoT solution. It’s open source so you can customize it to fit your business. Use it as a reference for your own solution, or as a demo to see how a finished solution can work for you.”

There are four different accelerators:

1. Remote Monitoring
2. Connected Factory
3. Predictive Maintenance
4. Device Simulation

In this blog, we dive into the Device simulation:

“Streamline your IoT solution development by using simulated IoT devices to both build and test your solution throughout the software development lifecycle.”

This is an interesting tool to generate the output of many devices as if there are actually (thousands of) devices connected to an IoT Hub.

What can we do with it? How useful is it?

Visualizing Azure IoT Edge using local dashboard

In my last series of blogs, we first looked at how to deploy a non-IoT Edge module using Azure IoT Edge.

For this example, I used a NodeJS website running SocketIO. It was possible to access this website with a default SocketIO chat application.

After that, we looked at how to add some charts in the HTML page offered by the NodeJS server.

Let’s see how we can combine this all into one solution. Let’s build a local for raw Azure IoT Edge telemetry.

Show telemetry in NodeJS using SocketIO and HighCharts

In my previous blog, I showed you how to host NodeJS in a Docker Image.

Today we will learn how we show telemetry in NodeJS. The message will arrive as a string on an HTML page using SocketIO and we will put it on a chart from HighCharts.

This is a great example of how we can represent raw data in something useful, something end user will understand.

We will extend our previous example. In that example, we were leaning on NodeJS and we have the Express web framework running to show an HTML page. We added SocketIO so users of the index.html can exchange messages.

But what if the incoming message is

{
  "machine":{
    "temperature":21.810507137356563
  },
  "timeCreated":"2018-01-06T23:55:56.1058921Z"
}

a JSON message on a single line? And it is shown as a string?

Nice, but this is only good for nerds like me.

What if we could represent it as:

a chart?

This a much better solution, isn’t it?

Deploying a NodeJS server with SocketIO to Docker using Azure IoT Edge

The current Azure IoT Edge public preview uses Docker to deploy logic from the cloud into local gateways. It’s currently featuring:

• C# modules written in .Net standard
• Python modules
• Azure Function built on your machine
• Azure Stream Analytics jobs built and deployed in the cloud
• Azure Machine Learning

We can expect Microsoft will support other types of modules soon as they have proven with other recent projects. An Azure Cognitive Services module is a good example, it’s put in every IoT Edge presentation.

The IoT Edge portal makes it possible to deploy modules which are available in private or public image repositories.

Could it be possible to build and deploy images to the gateway which are not specifically designed for IoT Edge?

It turns out, it is possible.

Let’s deploy a NodeJS server which serves SocketIO.