What is Azure IoT Operations?

Azure IoT Operations is a unified data plane for the edge. It's a collection of modular, scalable, and highly available data services that run on Azure Arc-enabled edge Kubernetes clusters such as AKS Edge Essentials. It enables data capture from various different systems and integrates with data modeling applications such as Microsoft Fabric to help organizations deploy the industrial metaverse.

Azure IoT Operations:

• Is built from ground up by using Kubernetes native applications.
• Includes an industrial-grade, edge-native MQTT broker that powers event-driven architectures.
• Is highly extensible, scalable, resilient, and secure.
• Lets you manage edge services and resources from the cloud by using Azure Arc.
• Can integrate customer workloads into the platform to create a unified solution.
• Supports GitOps configuration as code for deployment and updates.
• Natively integrates with Azure Event Hubs, Azure Event Grid's MQTT broker, and Microsoft Fabric in the cloud.

Use Azure IoT Operations to:

• Improve business efficiency and decision making by using AI in the cloud to analyze asset and equipment data from the edge. Azure IoT Operations can process and normalize the data at the edge before it's sent to the cloud.
• Transform manufacturing environments by removing barriers between OT and IT systems. Azure IoT Operations supports open standards such as MQTT and OPC UA, and frameworks such as Kubernetes, that enable it to foster interoperability and run processes such as predictive maintenance, energy optimization, and digital inspection.
• Modernize on-premises and edge infrastructure to handle digital operations. Azure IoT Operations offers a suite of services that enable you to connect, manage, and receive data from your assets.
• Secure your end-to-end operations by using Azure security capabilities. Azure IoT Operations has built-in security capabilities such as secrets management, certificate management, and secure settings.

Example use cases

Use Azure IoT Operations to address use cases such as:

Anomaly detection

To identify anomalies in the data generated by an industrial asset, an operator can use the operations experience web UI to:

• Connect an OPC UA asset to the Azure IoT Operations MQTT broker at the edge.
• Define a dataflow that processes and normalizes the data before identifying any anomalies.
• Send the processed data to Microsoft Fabric in the cloud.

You can then use Microsoft Fabric to build real-time dashboards with visualizations that show the status of the asset and alerts for any detected anomalies. You can make these dashboards available on the shop floor where operators can use them to take immediate action and mitigate potential issues. By using predictive analytics and data on the edge, you can anticipate failures before they occur, and reduce downtime and maintenance costs.

Operational equipment effectiveness

With Azure IoT Operations, you can use data collected from assets and equipment to improve your operational equipment effectiveness. Azure IoT Operations captures real-time data at the edge and processes it enabling you to monitor key performance indicators such as availability, performance, and quality. Use Azure IoT Operations to normalize and analyze the data to identify patterns and areas for improvement.

Architecture overview

There are two core elements in the Azure IoT Operations architecture:

• Azure IoT Operations. The set of data services that run on Azure Arc-enabled edge Kubernetes clusters. It includes the following services:
  • The MQTT broker is an edge-native MQTT broker that powers event-driven architectures.
  • The connector for OPC UA handles the complexities of OPC UA communication with OPC UA servers and other leaf devices.
  • Dataflows provide data transformation and data contextualization capabilities and enable you to route messages to various locations including cloud endpoints.
• The operations experience is a web UI that provides a unified experience for operational technologists (OT) to manage assets and dataflows in an Azure IoT Operations deployment. An IT administrator can use Azure Arc site manager (preview) to group Azure IoT Operations instances by physical location and make it easier for OT users to find instances.

Deploy

Azure IoT Operations runs on Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters on the edge. You can deploy Azure IoT Operations by using the Azure portal or the Azure CLI.

Manage devices and assets

Azure IoT Operations can connect to various industrial devices and assets. You can use the operations experience or the Azure CLI to manage the devices and assets that you want to connect to.

The connector for OPC UA manages the connection to OPC UA servers and other leaf devices. The connector for OPC UA publishes data from the OPC UA servers to MQTT broker topics.

Azure IoT Operations uses the Azure Device Registry to store information about local assets in the cloud. The service enables you to manage assets on the edge from the Azure portal or the Azure CLI. The Azure Device Registry also includes a schema registry for the assets. Dataflows use these schemas to deserialize and serialize messages.

Automatic asset discovery

Automatic asset discovery using Akri services, Azure Device Registry, the connector for OPC UA, the connection for ONVIF (preview), and the media connector (preview) is available in the current version of Azure IoT Operations. Currently, there are no user configurable scenarios for Akri services in the operations experience web UI for automatic asset discovery.

To learn more, see the release notes for the current version.

If you're using a previous preview version of Azure IoT Operations, you can find the Akri services documentation on the previous versions site.

Publish and subscribe with MQTT

The MQTT broker runs on the edge. It lets you publish and subscribe to MQTT topics. You can use the MQTT broker to build event-driven architectures that connect your devices and assets to the cloud.

Examples of how components in Azure IoT Operations use the MQTT broker include:

• The connector for OPC UA publishes data from OPC UA servers and other leaf devices to MQTT topics.
• Dataflows subscribe to MQTT topics to retrieve messages for processing before sending them to cloud endpoints.

Connect to the cloud

To connect to the cloud from Azure IoT Operations, you can use the following dataflow destination endpoints:

• Azure Event Grid and other cloud-based MQTT brokers
• Azure Event Hubs or Kafka
• Azure Data Lake Storage
• Microsoft Fabric OneLake
• Azure Data Explorer

Offline support

Azure IoT Operations support max offline time for 72 hours. Degradation may occur within 72 hours. However, Azure IoT Operations will resume fully functional when it reconnects.

Process data

Dataflows provide enhanced data transformation and data contextualization capabilities within Azure IoT Operations. Dataflows can use schemas stored in the schema registry to deserialize and serialize messages.

Visualize and analyze telemetry

To visualize and analyze telemetry from your devices and assets, you can use cloud services such as:

• Microsoft Fabric
• Power BI

Secure communication

To secure communication between devices and the cloud through isolated network environments based on the ISA-95/Purdue Network architecture, use the Azure IoT Layered Network Management (preview) component.

Supported environments

Microsoft supports the following environments for Azure IoT Operations deployments.

Supported regions

Azure IoT Operations supports clusters that are Arc-enabled in the following regions:

This list of supported regions only applies to the region that you use when connecting your cluster to Azure Arc. This list doesn't restrict you from using your preferred Azure region for your cloud resources. Azure IoT Operations components and other resources deployed to your cluster in these supported regions can still connect to cloud resources in different regions.

Dependencies

Azure IoT Operations depends on the following set of support services and features:

• Azure Device Registry
• Schema registry
• Azure Container Storage enabled by Azure Arc
• Azure Key Vault Secret Store extension
• Azure Monitor pipeline
• Workload identity federation in Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes

Next step

Try the Quickstart: Get started with an end-to-end sample.