Using Azure Logic apps as business rules for Azure Digital Twins

Although this feature just went into Public Preview, the new Azure Digital Twins connector for Microsoft Power Platform is very promising:

Azure Digital Twins (ADT) connector for Microsoft Power Platform enables you to incorporate Azure Digital Twins into Microsoft Power Automate flows, Power Apps applications, or Azure Logic Apps flows. 

With this connector, you can combine Azure Digital Twins with 700+ other Power Platform connectors to build flows or apps by ingesting data, coming from other systems, into the Azure Digital Twins environment.

You can do graph traversal:

Or, you can send data to Azure Digital Twins (twin update) as seen here:

It’s even possible to develop a flow that creates a digital twin, deriving from a model when an external system emits an event.

Let’s check out what this Azure Logic Apps connector offers for Azure Digital Twins.

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Azure Logic App actions for Azure Data Explorer

Azure Logic Apps are a convenient solution to add workflow logic, decision-making logic, and rules to your Azure solution.

There are hundreds of connectors with connections to all kinds of both Microsoft and third-party resources so you can literally connect the whole world and move data and insights from one place to another.

Azure Logic Apps also supports Azure Data Explorer, the queryable time-series data solution:

As you can see, you can execute both commands (for altering resources inside Azure Data Explorer) and table queries.

It even supports promises support for rendering charts!

In this post, we check out how to make use of these actions and charts so we can monitor and even control our Azure Data Explorer.

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Does your Azure IoT (Edge Ubuntu) device survive the Baltimore certificate migration?

Microsoft is still using the Baltimore certificate for its IoT services. This certificate is used for TLS communication with the IoT Hub and other IoT-related Azure services.

This is done by choice, to give users more time to migrate their devices if they are not (yet) able to support the new DigiCert Global Root G2 certificate automatically.

This year, starting next month, Microsoft will start the migration.

Check out this timeline:

This has been postponed a number of times already. It’s now time to act!

If both your Azure edge devices and Azure IoT edge devices are running Ubuntu, here are some pointers to test your devices.

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Exploring Azure Digital Twins Graph history

Update: the historical data export functionality now also export s twin lifecycle information. This means a part of the custom logic seen below is now part of the default export.

As seen in previous posts, Azure Digital Twins shows the current state of any twin in the Azure Digital Twins graph.

This current state is a combination of multiple items:

twin name and model
twin properties updates based on telemetry and/or business rules related to that telemetry
twin properties updates based on predictions towards the future
twin properties updates based on historical data

Azure Digital Twins also offers to store historical Twin property data. That historical data is made available using Azure Data Explorer, part of the data history connection, as explained in my previous post.

There, twin data can also be compared with twin graph knowledge using the ADX Kusto plugin for querying the ADT graph.

Still, that accompanying plugin is missing something. We have no historical knowledge of the graph itself including models and how these changed over time!

If we want this information, we need to be creative.

Can we add the missing pieces?

Let’s check out how we can explore the ADT graph history…

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ADX Kusto plug-in for Azure Digital Twins history

Azure Digital Twins is the perfect solution for modeling your (Industrial) IoT metaverse.

Each ‘actor’ in the real world (devices, machines, places, buildings, environments) can be represented in the digital world.

Azure Digital Twins shows the current situation of those actors, complete with relationships and additional business rules.

These rules can also trigger cascading changes through the graph when parents and siblings are influenced by child property changes.

See a previous blog post on working with Azure Digital Twins and representing the environment in a 3D visualization.

But this solution has one weak spot: how about the historical twin property changes caused by the business rules?

I already demonstrated how to store historical raw telemetry as the cold path.

We would like to store the Twin data next to it.

Fortunately, Azure Digital Twins also supports storing historical data in Azure Data Explorer:

This historical data can even be queried together with Azure Digital Twin graph data.

So, the output of an ADT graph query can be joined with a Kusto query!

Let’s check out how this works.

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Azure Data Explorer as a data source for Azure Managed Grafana dashboards

Internet of Things solutions must provide insights, based on data provided by devices and other resources.

Adding dashboards to an IoT solution is the most common way to add that value.

There are a number of popular platforms for custom dashboarding, including Grafana.

Their solution is offered both in a commercial way and as an open-source version.

I have already written a couple of blog posts about working with Grafana, both in the cloud and on the edge.

The cloud version was initially based on VM technology in Azure.

Recently, Azure started offering a managed PaaS version. It takes away the ‘pain’ of managing the environment.

Due to security concerns, Azure Managed Grafana doesn’t currently support custom plugins. According to the website, you’ll have the option to add Grafana Enterprise plugins at a later date.

Personally, Grafana is a nice addition for me to display data stored in Azure Data Explorer next to the dashboarding solution offered by Azure Data Explorer itself (currently in preview).

So, there is now an integration possible between these two worlds.

Let’s check out how Grafana dashboards can be put on top of Azure Data Explorer.

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Using the new IoT Hub CosmosDB routing endpoint

The Azure IoT Hub is your cloud gateway for ingesting telemetry.

The IoT Hub cannot persist incoming messages so these must be forwarded to other Azure services.

Traditionally, the messages are exposed over an Event Hub-compatible endpoint.

More recent, (non-functional) IoT Hub routing is added where specific Azure services can be connected as an endpoint:

At this moment we can define:

The build-in endpoint (to keep the original way of distributing messages)
Event Hub
Service Bus (Topics/Queues)
Storage account, blob storage (perfect for cheap cold storage)

Lately, a native endpoint for CosmosDB has been made available.

This takes the pain away of having to set up extra resources between the IoT Hub and CosmosDB, just to transport messages from one resource to another. This is mostly done using a Stream Analytics job or custom Azure Functions.

In this post, let’s check out the new endpoint.

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