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Introduction

Azure IoT Central provides a rich, easy to use IoT Application platform providing rich functionality to accelerate your overall IoT Solution. While IoT Central provides many built in features that help reduce the burden and cost of developing, managing connected IoT devices. IoT Central also exposes a set of rich extensibility and integration points that allow you to leverage IoT Central's features and capabilities in your overall IoT Solutions architecture to accelerate and derive business value / insights in your overall IoT Solution.

This guide provides insights into various tried & tested, production capable patterns and samples that you can to integrate IoT Central as part of your overall IoT Solution architecture.

Scenarios

Getting connected and sending data

IoT Central provides various connectivity options for connecting your devices to IoT Central. For most scenarios that that have devices capable of utilizing IoT Hub device SDKs, please check IoT Central's device connectivity documentation in IoT Central.

Getting Connected

Device connectivity patterns in general fall under two broad categories:

Persistent

Persistent device connectivity scenarios are where a persistent connection is desirable from the device to the cloud for command and control scenarios. Persistent connections maintain a network connection to the cloud and re-connect whenever there is a disruption to the connected client on the device. Persistent connections allow the cloud to issue command and control messages to the device in near realtime. Common persistent connection protocols supported by IoT Central are MQTT and AMQP.

IoT Central provides various options to support persistent device connectivity:

Ephemeral

Ephemeral device connectivity scenarios are where a connection is briefly made to transmit data captured by a device to the cloud. Once the data is transmitted, the connection to the cloud is terminated and connection is re-established for transmitting data the next time. Since the connection is ephemeral, this type of device connectivity should be utilized where command and control of the devices are not required.

IoT Central provides various options to support ephemeral device connectivity:

See the Guides and Samples section that contains guides and samples for getting devices connected, sending data, command and control devices connected to IoT Central.

Transform and custom computation

Many IoT scenarios may require augmenting the data being sent from IoT devices with auxiliary information from external systems or stores before the data is ingested into IoT Central, allowing the augmented data to be used when leveraging IoT Central features.

Some scenarios may also require transformations of data before ingested into IoT Central, especially when migrating existing devices that may be using data encoded in a legacy or unsupported format.

To support such scenarios, IoT Central provides the following options to perform custom transform or computation before ingesting data into IoT Central:

Guides and samples

Below are some guides, samples and utilities you can leverage for exploring various device connectivity patterns with IoT Central described above:

Extract business value from IoT data

IoT data provides an opportunity for driving insight and innovation across many business boundaries, and IoT Central provides a rich platform that helps accelerate extracting business value from your IoT data. While IoT Central provides many built-in features that you can leverage out of the box to gain insights and take action on your IoT data, however many IoT solution scenarios require a more controlled or specialized set of business processes to execute over captured IoT data.

Guides and samples

Below are some guides, samples and utilities you can leverage for exploring various approaches of extracting business value with IoT Central:

Companion apps & experiences

While IoT Central provides rich operator dashboards and visualizations, many IoT Solution have the need to integrate existing applications, experiences and applications that are already deployed. When bringing in IoT Central as part of your overall IoT Solutions architecture, IoT Central provides various extensibility points allowing you to integrate existing services and applications via it's public REST API and continuous data export feature. Companion apps and experiences can use the following IoT Central's capabilities to integrate:

Guides and samples