The product is highly secure, scales with our business as it grows, ensures our investments are repeatable, and integrates with our existing business apps.
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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)
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (11-50 employees)
