Azure IOT Hub - Monitor Device-To-Cloud communication from 1 device

Question

There are x number of devices in system and y numbers of device owners. These devices are actively sending data to Azure IOT Hub - temperature, humidity, voltage, etc.

These devices have RFID chips inside them that store information about device and I'm working with Xamarin.Forms project that would allow android/iOS users to get this information.

Upon retrieving this information about the device, I want users to be able to see and monitor the device-to-cloud Azure IOT communication.

In similar fashion, I'm working on a web dashboard, where user could just select device from dropdown/selection and do the same thing.

I've tried implementing the Azure Device Explorer approach, however here's the problem; in Azure IOT Hub, one consumer group can only have 5 clients and once, meaning, if 6 people want to monitor the live device-to-cloud communication, only 5 people will be able to do it. Furthermore, what this example does is - get all incoming IOT Hub messages, query and filter only the information that the user wants to see - which would probably put quite of a load on mobile phones.

So the question is: Is there a way to see live device-to-cloud Azure IOT Hub communication from a single device?

I'm open to adding other Azure services.

Answer 1

The Azure IoT Hub telemetry path (hot path) is a data stream of all devices ingested internally into the default built-in Event Hub or externally via the custom endpoint. To see a telemetry data from the single device, it is necessary to capture a telemetry stream and use a filtering technique for a specific data. In other words, the telemetry stream must flow transparently in the stream pipeline without any latency and the capture point will hold a copy of the telemetry window.

This warm path is close to the real-time (hot path) and it can be configured from 1-15 minutes.

The following screen snippet shows an example of the warm path using an Event Hub feature such as Capture. Note, that this feature is not in the Azure IoT Hub, so that's used a custom endpoint with an external Event Hub:

Once we have a telemetry warm path (stored in the Blobs, for example each minute), we can query a device messages, twin changes events and device lifecycle events based on the time, value, etc. by user request, eventing or trigger.

Answer 2

I am working on a similar project, we developed a web app with back end database. this db stores all the iot messages as it comes in, web app send the push notification via azure notification hub to the mobile clients interested about a device. All the business logic and operations is written in the web api project.

Mobiles directly do not communicate with IOT, they communicate via api to get the information from db, and using push notification helps to keep everything real time.

we are using azure functions for reading message from iot as it comes and process.