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Great if you're an long time Microsoft user, it's getting better all the time
November 03, 2021

Great if you're an long time Microsoft user, it's getting better all the time

Mirza Sisic | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Azure IoT Central

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.
  • 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.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft Azure IoT Central go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Azure IoT Central again?

Yes

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.