Solution accelerator for Industrial IoT on Azure

Often times I have seen customers and partners getting stuck at how to use Microsoft's OPC modules and how to use OPC UA data upstream for different purposes. This project is a solution accelerator that provides guidance on how to get started with the OPC Publisher module at the edge and data visualization. This article makes some important assumptions:

· The initial version of this deployment provides default security settings. This is not recommended for production environments as security is something that should be discussed and planned in advance.

· The IoT edge runtime is deployed on an Ubuntu 18.04 virtual machine. Similar results can be achieved with Windows or other Linux distributions as well.

[!IMPORTANT]: This solution aims to serve as a starting point to get familiar with some of the core components of the Industrial IoT platform and other Azure services that are usually paired with them in production scenarios. For a complete deployment of the Azure Industrial IoT Platform, please refer to the official repository here.

Pre-requisites

In order to successfully deploy this solution, you will need a couple of things first:

· PowerShell 7. This deployment script is written in PowerShell. If you are using a Linux environment, follow these instructions to install PowerShell on Linux.

· Azure CLI. Follow these instructions to install or update to the latest version.

· Webhook endpoint. This solution uses Azure Event Grid to send notifications and alerts, so you will need a webhook endpoint to receive such events. There are several services that provide this functionality for free. You can obtain a webhook URL by going to https://webhook.site/ and copying your unique URL.

[!NOTE]: If you are interested in understanding how Azure Event Grid works and create your own webhook, take a look at this Azure Event Grid viewer sample solution.

Architecture

Getting started

Webhook validation

[!IMPORTANT:] Please read the section below, as it details steps needed for your deployment to succeed.

Shortly after the deployment starts, your webhook will receive two messages containing a validation URL that needs to be triggered in order for the deployment to succeed. That is because at the time of event subscription creation/update, Event Grid posts a validation event to the target endpoint that includes a validationUrl property with a URL for manually validating the subscription. You need to copy the validationUrl property and open it on your browser within 5 minutes of the event subscription creation/update. Failure to complete these steps will cause the deployment to partially fail.

An example subscription validation event is shown below:

[
  {
    "id": "2d1781af-3a4c-4d7c-bd0c-e34b19da4e66",
    "topic": "/subscriptions/xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx",
    "subject": "",
    "data": {
      "validationCode": "512d38b6-c7b8-40c8-89fe-f46f9e9622b6",
      "validationUrl": "https://rp-eastus2.eventgrid.azure.net:553/eventsubscriptions/estest/validate?id=512d38b6-c7b8-40c8-89fe-f46f9e9622b6&t=2018-04-26T20:30:54.4538837Z&apiVersion=2018-05-01-preview&token=1A1A1A1A"
    },
    "eventType": "Microsoft.EventGrid.SubscriptionValidationEvent",
    "eventTime": "2018-01-25T22:12:19.4556811Z",
    "metadataVersion": "1",
    "dataVersion": "1"
  }
]

After calling the validation URL from your browser, you should see the success message "Webhook successfully validated as a subscription endpoint.".

Deployment Start

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/marvin-garcia/IoTGateway.git
cd IoTGateway

Start the deployment:

. ./Scripts/deploy.ps1

Next Steps

Once the solution has been successfully deployed, you may want to spend some time understanding each component:

1. OPC Simulator
2. OPC Publisher
3. Stream Analytics Edge job
4. OPC Translator
5. IoT Edge Deployment
6. Stream Analytics Cloud job
7. Notification & Alerting
8. Real-time data visualization with Time Series Insights
9. Data visualization through Azure Data Explorer