Device telemetry
There are many uses cases where the value for IoT is in collecting telemetry on how a machine or asset is performing. For example, this data can be used to predict costly, unforeseen equipment failures. Telemetry must be collected from the machine and sent to an IoT application. Another benefit of sending telemetry is the ability of your cloud applications to use this data for analysis and to interpret optimizations that can be made to your firmware over time.
Read-only telemetry data is collected and transmitted to the IoT application. Telemetry data and command and control should be kept on separate MQTT topic namespaces. Telemetry data topics should start with a prefix such as 'data', for example data/device/sensortype. Control plane topics should start with a prefix such as 'command'.
From a logical perspective, we have defined several scenarios for capturing and interacting with device data telemetry.
Options for capturing telemetry
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One publishing topic and one subscriber. For example, a smart light bulb that publishes its brightness level to a single topic where only a single application can subscribe.
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One publishing topic with variables and one subscriber. For example, a collection of smart bulbs publishing their brightness on similar but unique topics. Each subscriber can listen to a unique publish message.
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Single publishing topic and multiple subscribers. In this case, a light sensor that publishes its values to a topic that all the light bulbs in a house subscribe to.
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Multiple publishing topics and a single subscriber. For example, a collection of light bulbs with motion sensors. The smart home system subscribes to all of the light bulb topics, inclusive of motion sensors, and creates a composite view of brightness and motion sensor data.
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AWS IoT Sitewise edge software running on an edge gateway is used to collect, organize, process, and monitor equipment data on-premises and sends it to AWS IoT Sitewise cloud service for data storage, organization and visualization.
Other AWS IoT services which can be used for device telemetry data ingestion are AWS IoT Sitewise for industrial data and AWS IoT FleetWise for vehicle data.
