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Azure IoT Central

Azure IoT Central

Overview

What is Azure IoT Central?

Microsoft Azure IoT Central allows users to connect IoT devices to the cloud and offers centralized management to configure and updated connected devices.

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Pricing

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What is Azure IoT Central?

Microsoft Azure IoT Central allows users to connect IoT devices to the cloud and offers centralized management to configure and updated connected devices.

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  • No setup fee

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  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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What is Azure IoT Hub?

Microsoft's Azure IoT Hub is a managed service for bidirectional communication between IoT devices and Azure. Azure IoT Hub provides a cloud-hosted solution back end to connect virtually any device. Users can extend their solutions from the cloud to the edge with per-device authentication, built-in…

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Product Demos

Wio Terminal Classroom with IoT #4 | Microsoft Azure IoT Central with IoT Plug and Play

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Product Details

Azure IoT Central Technical Details

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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(13)

Reviews

(1-4 of 4)
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Alfred Brock | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Azure IoT Central to run our applications for monitoring the sensors we have in our tanks. We have plant biomes as well as a fish [tank] set. We are able to both monitor and adjust the sensors as well as remotely control our heaters, filters, and other devices attached to the systems. We also use it [facilitates] data collection from all points.
  • It allows us to collect information at one point remotely.
  • It allows us to control our conditioning and feeding systems remotely.
  • We can collect data from various points and then transform it when received at a central point.
  • I would like to more easily integrate other systems like PowerBI.
  • Support is sometimes slow especially when we are doing something new.
One scenario where it was appropriate was allowing us to communicate through apps with our temperature, moisture, and water quality sensors. It's great to have the recordings done automatically and sent back to a central processing point. It is also highly useful when used to collect this data around the clock. One situation where it was less appropriate was in trying to extend our beginning services to other businesses. This is really more of a logistical problem and not really one for the software.
  • Ease of use
  • Reliability
  • Cost level
  • It has allowed us to expand the number of times data is collected without adding cost.
  • It has allowed us to train our technicians in the use the technology so they gain more useful skills.
  • We have been able to develop a business model that is not bound by our physical location.
Microsoft Azure IoT is easier to use and is ultimately more powerful. We selected Microsoft IoT Central because it is a familiar platform at a reasonable price. We were pleased with the capabilities right away. Siemens had some more in-depth support available but it was mostly geared towards getting the software going in the first place. That additional setup time as well as the complicated manner in which to expand the system were major concerns. By its nature and capabilities, Microsoft Azure IoT lent itself to adaptation and expansion internally.
Azure AD Security Governance, AudioCodes Mediant Enterprise Session Border Controllers (E-SBCs), Skype for Business (formerly Lync), now part of Microsoft Teams
January 07, 2022

Experience brings wisdom

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The product is highly secure, scales with our business as it grows, ensures our investments are repeatable, and integrates with our existing business apps.
  • highly secure
  • predictable pricing
  • Focuesed industry
  • central application
  • smartphone app
Automatic registration and Manual registration
  • connect a device with device SAS
  • Create individual enrollments
  • Continuous and significant progress
  • Integration of the product in the ongoing work and improvement of our system capacity
  • Convenient interface
Handles excellently and after trying a few of them I saw that it is most suitable for the current work of the company and all the products that the company works with
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used it for a smaller IoT project (due to NDA I can't disclose full details), it helped ease the development and reduced the costs quite a bit, also, it made maintaining the app much easier, as all is done from one central location. IoT Central has a useful user interface, allowing you to manage all your IoT devices, configure user roles, create and manage apps, integrate and administer your app. From a usability point of view, Microsoft Azure IoT Central is a well-built product, which in my experience has proven to be very useful.
  • Creation and management of user roles, who can access your IoT resources and configure the level of access, very granular and self-explanatory
  • Configuration of apps and devices, integrations, and administrations are done in an intuitive way and it's easy to navigate your way through the available settings.
  • The documentation is really excellent, everything is explained succinctly and there are enough practical examples to get you started.
  • Existing templates can save you a lot of time in getting your desired setup complete with less effort and time invested.
  • They could add more variations to their pricing, make it more flexible for smaller projects with limited budgets, more pricing plans basically.
  • Integration of IoT hardware and embedded systems could do with minor improvements
  • Documentation for logs could be a bit more detailed, like the rest of the docs.
  • I wish they could add more security options, as leaving it by the default values opens up too many vulnerabilities.
  • Add support for more operating systems, especially the not so mainstream ones, like Huawei Harmony, as their devices are widely used in certain parts of the world.
Microsoft Azure IoT Central has native integrations with Visual Studio (like pretty much all Microsoft products) making it pretty simple to publish apps to Azure App Service, where you can host all sorts of different applications. It does a really good job of storing large amounts of data (for instance, collected from IoT devices with various sensors) and it gets stored to multiple DBs. Azure IoT Central could improve by adding more customizations, as this would make troubleshooting the products easier and make future costs smaller and easier to predict.
  • Developing apps for IoT devices
  • Seamless integrations with other products from the Microsoft's ecosystem
  • Easier maintenance of complex enterprise IoT solutions
  • 9% guaranteed uptime by the SLA
  • Affordable billing for smaller data transfers between devices, under 4KB
  • Free devices and messages for higher pricing tiers, for example for Standard Tier 2 we got two free devices and 60k included free messages.
Before deciding to go with Microsoft Azure IoT Central, we considered Google, Datadog, and AWS alternatives. The reason we went with Azure was that the client was heavily invested in Microsoft technologies and Azure plays really well with other Microsoft products. The competitive products might be a little bit easier to set up, with more flexible pricing, but, the integrations with other Microsoft services were the deciding factor for our use case.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Company's need was for a platform to support application IoT systems and application development. In my personal case, I was newly introduced to all concepts which Azure offered: IoT world, centralized system and platform as a service. Microsoft's documentation on the topic was very good and handy in a lot of situations. For a beginner to set up an IoT system it was easy as a couple of clicks, but after some time I wished that it was a bit deeper because it gets harder to build on more complex solutions as the tutorials really just document the basics and not "what it actually does". IoT services (IoT hub, stream analytics, etc) themselves offer a fine programmatic approach (API) as well as easy to configure GUI on their portal. This was just the basic usage as later on in the company we went much further into building complex solutions using Azure's IoT services. In the beginning, documentation was good and covered a lot of things and the only complaint we had was that not enough problems have been encountered and solved, as for many difficulties it was a process of trying many different approaches until finding a good one.
  • Documentation
  • Support
  • Good and approachable GUI
  • Many types of subscription configurations
  • Lack of info on error messages
  • GUI misses important configuration options
  • Not well documented options inside IoT Hub for example (consumer groups)
If there is a need for a system to be developed in a short time then Azure IoT Central is the perfect option, offering a fast solution for a simple system that can be used and built upon. This is a great advantage as it skips on some details, also this is a bit of a disadvantage as most times developers want to know what they are working with.
  • Scalability
  • Ease of use
  • good subscription options
  • positive: connected huge number of machines as IoT devices and passed them through entire IoT pipeline until storage in a fairly short time
  • negative: we spent some time figuring out some "less-used" services because they aren't documented well
I haven't used any similar product, but I have heard about Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud capabilities. I don't know how would Azure stack up to them.
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