What is asset management in Azure IoT Operations Preview

Important

Azure IoT Operations Preview – enabled by Azure Arc is currently in PREVIEW. You shouldn't use this preview software in production environments.

See the Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews for legal terms that apply to Azure features that are in beta, preview, or otherwise not yet released into general availability.

In Azure IoT Operations Preview, a key task is to manage the assets that are part of your solution. This article defines what assets are, overviews the services you use to manage them, and explains the most common use cases for the services.

Understand assets

Assets are a core component of Azure IoT Operations. It's important to understand how assets relate to IoT devices.

An IoT device is a physical object connected to the internet to collect, generate, and communicate data. IoT devices typically contain embedded components to perform specific functions. They can manage or monitor other things in their environment. Examples of IoT devices include crop sensors, smart thermostats, connected security cameras, wearable devices, and monitoring devices for manufacturing machinery or vehicles.

An asset in an industrial edge environment is any item of value that an IoT device can manage or monitor. While all IoT devices are assets, not all assets are devices. An asset can also be a machine, a process, software, an entire system, or a physical object of value such as crops, or a building. These assets are common examples that exist in manufacturing, retail, energy, healthcare, and other sectors.

An asset in Azure IoT Operations is a logical entity (an asset instance) that you create to represent a real asset. An Azure IoT Operations asset can emit telemetry, and can have properties (writable data points), and commands (executable data points) that describe its behavior and characteristics. You use these asset instances in the software to manage the real assets in your industrial edge environment.

Understand services for managing assets

Azure IoT Operations includes several services that let you perform key tasks required to manage your assets.

The following diagram shows the high-level architecture of Azure IoT Operations. The services that you use to manage assets are highlighted in red.

• Azure IoT Operations (preview) portal. The Azure IoT Operations (preview) portal is a web app that lets you create and manage assets, and configure data processing pipelines. The portal simplifies the task of managing assets. The Azure IoT Operations (preview) portal is the recommended service to manage assets.
• Azure Device Registry Preview. The Device Registry is a service that projects industrial assets as Azure resources. It works together with the Azure IoT Operations (preview) portal to streamline the process of managing assets. Device Registry lets you manage all your assets in the cloud, as true Azure resources contained in a single unified registry.
• Azure IoT Akri Preview. Azure IoT Akri is a service that discovers assets at the edge. The service can detect and create assets in the address space of an OPC UA Server.
• Azure IoT OPC UA Broker Preview. OPC UA Broker is a data ingress and protocol translation service that enables assets to ingress data into Azure IoT Operations, based on the widely used OPC UA standard. Azure IoT Operations uses OPC UA Broker to ingress data from OPC UA servers into the Azure IoT MQ Preview service.

Each of these services is explained in greater detail in the following sections that discuss use cases for managing assets.

Create and manage assets remotely

The following tasks are useful for operations teams in sectors such as industry, retail, and health.

• Create assets remotely
• Subscribe to OPC UA tags to access asset data
• Create data pipelines to modify and exchange data with the cloud

The Azure IoT Operations (preview) portal lets operations teams perform all these tasks in a simplified web interface. The portal uses the other services described previously, to enable all these tasks.

The Azure IoT Operations (preview) portal uses the OPC UA Broker service, which exchanges data with local OPC UA servers. OPC UA servers are software applications that communicate with assets. OPC UA servers expose OPC UA tags that represent data points. OPC UA tags provide real-time or historical data about the status, performance, quality, or condition of assets.

A data pipeline is a sequence of stages that process and transform data from one or more sources to one or more destinations. A data pipeline can perform various operations on the data, such as filtering, aggregating, enriching, validating, or analyzing.

The Azure IoT Operations (preview) portal lets users create assets and subscribe to OPC UA tags in a user-friendly interface. Users can create custom assets by providing asset details and configurations. Users can create or import tags, subscribe to them, and assign them to an asset. The portal also lets users create data pipelines by defining the sources, destinations, stages, and rules of the pipeline. Users can configure the parameters and logic of each stage using graphical tools or code editors.

Manage assets as Azure resources in a centralized registry

In an industrial edge environment with many assets, it's useful for IT and operations teams to have a single centralized registry for devices and assets. Azure Device Registry Preview is a service that provides this capability, and projects industrial assets as Azure resources. Teams that use Device Registry together with the Azure IoT Operations (preview) portal, gain a consistent deployment and management experience across cloud and edge environments.

Device Registry provides several capabilities that help teams to manage assets:

• Unified registry. The Device Registry serves as the single source of truth for your asset metadata. Having a single registry can streamline and simplify the process of managing assets. It gives you a way to access and manage this data across Azure, partner, and customer applications running in the cloud or on the edge.
• Assets as Azure resources. Because Device Registry projects assets as true Azure resources, you can manage assets using established Azure features and services. Enterprises can use Azure Resource Manager, Azure’s native deployment and management service, with industrial assets. Azure Resource Manager provides capabilities such as resource groups, tags, role-based access controls (RBAC), policy, logging, and audit.
• Cloud management of assets. You use Device Registry within the Azure IoT Operations (preview) portal to remotely manage assets in the cloud. All interactions with the asset resource are also available via Azure API and using management tools such as Azure Resource Graph. Regardless which method you use to manage assets, changes made in the cloud are synced to the edge and exposed as Custom Resources (CRs) in the Kubernetes cluster.

The following features are supported in Azure Device Registry:

Feature	Supported	Symbol
Asset resource management via Azure API	Supported	✅
Asset resource management via Azure IoT Operations (preview) portal	Supported	✅
Asset synchronization to Kubernetes cluster running Azure IoT Operations	Supported	✅
Asset as Azure resource (supports ARG, resource groups, tags, etc.)	Supported	✅

Discover edge assets

A common task in complex edge solutions is to discover assets and add them to your Kubernetes cluster. Azure IoT Akri Preview provides this capability. It enables you to detect and add OPC UA assets to your cluster. For administrators who attach devices to or remove them from the cluster, using Azure IoT Akri reduces the level of coordination and manual configuration.

An Azure IoT Akri deployment can include fixed-network discovery handlers. Discovery handlers enable assets from known network endpoints to find leaf devices as they appear on device interfaces or local subnets. Examples of network endpoints include OPC UA servers at a fixed IP (without network scanning), and network scanning discovery handlers.

When you install Azure IoT Operations, Azure IoT Akri is installed and can be configured along with an OPC UA simulation PLC server. Azure IoT Operations OPC UA discovery handler starts automatically and inspects the OPC UA simulation PLC server's address space. The discovery handler reports assets back to Azure IoT Akri and triggers deployment of the AssetEndpointProfile and Asset CRs into the cluster.

Use a common data exchange standard for your edge solution

A critical need in industrial environments is to have a common standard or protocol for machine-to-machine and machine-to-cloud data exchange. By using a widely supported data exchange protocol, you can simplify the process to enable diverse industrial assets to exchange data with each other, with workloads running in your Kubernetes cluster, and with the cloud. OPC UA is a specification for a platform independent service-oriented architecture that enables data exchange in industrial environments.

An industrial environment that uses the OPC UA standard, includes the following basic OPC UA elements:

• An OPC UA server is software based on the OPC UA specification that communicates with assets and provides core OPC UA services to those assets.
• An OPC UA client. An OPC UA client is software that interacts with an OPC UA server in a request and response network pattern. An OPC UA client connects to OPC UA servers, and submits requests for actions on data items like reads and writes.

Azure IoT OPC UA Broker is a service in Azure IoT Operations that enables data ingress from OPC UA servers into your edge solution, and the cloud, based on the OPC UA standard. When you install Azure IoT Operations, you can optionally install OPC UA Broker with an OPC UA simulation server, which lets you test and use the service.

Next step

In this overview, you learned what assets are, what Azure IoT Operations services you use to manage them, and some common use cases for managing assets. Here's the suggested next step to start adding assets and tags in your edge solution:

Manage assets remotely