How can I make use of telemetry from Azure IoT Hub?

Question

Good day,

I have been testing out Azure IoT Hub and so far all I managed to do was connect my device and receive data from it. How can I forward the telemetry from my device(s) to another service (API call to another website). I have looked around but it seems I am going in circles. Message Routing? Event Grid? Event Hub?

So far I have read: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-hub/iot-hub-event-grid

I just want to forward the telemetry and let another website process the payload. Please help.

Answer 1

Hello @Conrado Camilon ,

welcome to this moderated Azure community forum.

The Azure IoT Hub is an IoT cloud gateway. It's special abilities are having a device registry where each device has a device twin with unique credentials and the ability to ingest telemetry and sending back commands (Direct Methods) or passing on state (desired properties).

Messages arriving in the IoT Hub should be forwarded as a stream to one or more Azure services that turn these messages into insights.

You probably need to gain knowledge about services like Azure Stream Analytics, Azure Data Explorer, Event Hub and Logic Apps if you want to build a complete IoT platform. It's not that hard to understand a happy flow solution it it can be overwhelming at first.

Here are a few possibilities regarding passing on data to other services:

• the default 'eventhub compatible endpoint'. This endpoint can be used as an input for Azure Stream Analytics, Azure functions or the Azure Data Explorer data connection. Notice that each 'consumer' needs its own consumer group
• Azure IoT Hub routing makes it possible to route data to several endpoints like EventHubs, CosmosDB, Storage accounts, etc. Notice that while using this routing, the 'eventhub compatible endpoint' turns into a fall-back scenario. Please add an extra route for that endpoint if needed
• The events being send to an EventGrid. This makes it possible to send messages via het Eventgrid paltform to Eventgrid topics.

Messages that are not passed on will be removed from the IoT hub after the time-to-live timespan.

Message distributed to the Stream Analytics job can be distributed to other services using a (very extensive) stream analytics query language script that handles each message or groups of message.

I understand this is quite overwhelming.

I recommend to start with the FREE Azure Data Explorer.

By only adding an eventhub, you get access to a great database especially designed for telemetry (immutable event, observations, facts).

The full version, an Azure Data Explorer cluster, is the heart of every IoT project we do.

You can put a Managed Grafana dashboard on top of it or PowerBI.

You can add alerting on top of it via a Log Analytics workspace or you put a Stream Analytics job between the IoT Hub and the Eventhub to check for alerts.

There is so much to tell but that is for another time. I recommend just to start and experience the features and the value Azure IoT can bring you.

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