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IoT Central application administration guide

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An IoT Central application lets you monitor and manage your devices, letting you quickly evaluate your IoT scenario. This guide is for administrators who manage IoT Central applications.

IoT Central application administration includes the following tasks:

  • Create applications.
  • Manage security.
  • Configure application settings.
  • Upgrade applications.
  • Export and share applications.
  • Monitor application health.
  • DevOps integration.

Create applications

You use an application template to create an application. An application template consists of:

  • Sample dashboards
  • Sample device templates
  • Simulated devices producing real-time data
  • Preconfigured rules and jobs
  • Rich documentation including tutorials and how-tos

You choose the application template when you create your application. You can't change the template an application uses after you create it.

Custom templates

If you want to create your application from scratch, choose the Custom application template.

You can also create and manage your own custom application templates and copy applications to create new ones.

Industry focused templates

Azure IoT Central is an industry agnostic application platform. Application templates are industry focused examples available for these industries today:

Template ID Name Industry Description
iotc-pnp-preview Custom application N/A Creates an empty application for you to populate with your own device templates and devices.
iotc-condition In-store Analytics – Condition Monitoring Retail Creates an application to connect and monitor a store environment.
iotc-consumption Water Consumption Monitoring Government Creates an application to monitor and control water flow.
iotc-distribution Digital Distribution Center Retail Creates an application to improve warehouse output efficiency by digitizing key assets and actions.
iotc-inventory Smart Inventory Management Retail Creates an application to automate receiving, product movement, cycle counting, and tracking.
iotc-logistics Connected Logistics Retail Creates an application to track your shipments in real time across air, water, and land with location and condition monitoring.
iotc-meter Smart Meter Analytics Energy Creates an application to monitor energy consumption, network status, and identify trends to improve customer support and smart meter management.
iotc-mfc Micro-fulfillment Center Retail Creates an application to digitally connect and manage a fully automated fulfillment center.
iotc-patient Continuous Patient Monitoring Health Creates an application to extend patient care, reduce readmissions, and manage diseases.
iotc-power Solar Power Monitoring Energy Creates an application to monitor solar panel status and energy generation trends.
iotc-quality Water Quality Monitoring Government Creates an application to digitally monitor water quality.
iotc-store In-store Analytics – Checkout Retail Creates an application to monitor and manage the checkout flow inside your store.
iotc-waste Connected Waste Management Government Creates an application to monitor waste bins and dispatch field operators.

To learn more, see Create a retail application as an example.

Manage security

In IoT Central, you can configure and manage security in the following areas:

  • User access to your application.
  • Device access to your application.
  • Programmatic access to your application.
  • Authentication to other services from your application.
  • Use audit logs to track activity in your IoT Central application.

To learn more, see the IoT Central security guide.

Configure an application

An administrator can configure the behavior and appearance of an IoT Central application. To learn more, see:

Configure device file upload

An administrator can configure file uploads of an IoT Central application that lets connected devices upload media and other files to Azure Storage container. To learn more, see:

Export an application

An administrator can:

  • Create a copy of an application if you just need a duplicate copy of your application. For example, you might need a duplicate copy for testing.
  • Create an application template from an existing application if you plan to create multiple copies.

To learn more, see Create and use a custom application template.

Integrate with Azure Pipelines

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) refers to the process of developing and delivering software in short, frequent cycles using automation pipelines. You can use Azure Pipelines to automate the build, test, and deployment of IoT Central application configurations.

Just as IoT Central is a part of your larger IoT solution, make IoT Central a part of your CI/CD pipeline.

To learn more, see Integrate IoT Central into your Azure CI/CD pipeline.

Monitor application health

An administrator can use IoT Central metrics to assess the health of connected devices and the health of running data exports.

To view the metrics, an administrator can use charts in the Azure portal, a REST API, or PowerShell or Azure CLI queries.

To learn more, see Monitor application health.

Monitor connected IoT Edge devices

To learn how to monitor your IoT Edge fleet remotely by using Azure Monitor and built-in metrics integration, see Collect and transport metrics.

Tools

Many of the tools you use as an administrator are available in the Security and Settings sections of each IoT Central application. You can also use the following tools to complete some administrative tasks:

Next steps

Now that you've learned about how to administer your Azure IoT Central application, the suggested next step is to learn about Security in Azure IoT Central.