Event Hub alerts, great for detecting drops in connectivity

If we look at the Azure IoT Reference Architecture we see how streaming data is the heart of the IoT platform:

Data arrives at the IoT Hub and can be routed to any Azure resource using eg. the IoT Hub routing, Stream Analytics jobs and Event Hubs.

This gives us the maximum flexibility to divide the data into three major data streams or storage:

1. Hot path – Event, Alert, Conditions
2. Warm path – aggregated data, data for reporting
3. Cold path – the raw data, mainly untouched and available in large quantities; great for data scientists

But there is an often unseen, even ignored forth stream. And that is the stream of data for monitoring.

In my earlier blogs, I wrote several times hoe heartbeats en watchdogs can tell the story about the quality of the data. And I have shown how eg. Azure Functions and notification services can improve the insights about the quality of the communication.

Today I want to add a little gem to that list.

Let’s check out Monitoring Alerts in Event Hubs. It’s part of the overall Monitoring service in Azure.

Advertentie

A new batch of OPCPublisher direct methods

Update: As seen here, this functionality is only available of the OPCPublisher version 2.5 and below. You can upvote this feature request.

Recently, Microsoft put some real effort into updating the OPCPublisher project. This application/IoT Edge Module ingests telemetry from an OPC-UA Server.

I already wrote two blogs about it: Getting started with OPC-UA on Azure IoT Edge and Managing nodes from the cloud in the OPC-UA Publisher Edge. The seconds one showed how to connect to the OPCPublisher as an IoT Edge module using DirectMethods.

New methods have arrived, this time we get information about the module itself.

Let’s check them out.

Compare previous and current message in Stream Analytics

Last week I was testing the temporary storage in IoT Edge. I was interested in the stability so I wanted to know if messages were missing or maybe even coming in twice.

I have this heartbeat module which produces a counter. So I am able to generate messages which can be measured as a sequence.

One way is to check this using your eyes 🙂

But this can be seen as a more generic issue, comparing two messages after each other. So I was thinking about Azure Stream Analytics. This should be the perfect tool for this job.

Let’s check out how we can compare subsequent messages using Stream Analytics.