Microsoft Azure IoT Central - perfect for beginners, adequate for business
October 08, 2021

Microsoft Azure IoT Central - perfect for beginners, adequate for business

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Azure IoT Central

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.

Pros

  • Documentation
  • Support
  • Good and approachable GUI
  • Many types of subscription configurations

Cons

  • Lack of info on error messages
  • GUI misses important configuration options
  • Not well documented options inside IoT Hub for example (consumer groups)
  • 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.

Do you think Microsoft Azure IoT Central delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft Azure IoT Central's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft Azure IoT Central live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Microsoft Azure IoT Central go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Microsoft Azure IoT Central again?

Yes

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.

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