Managed IoT Cloud

Welcome to the Managed IoT Cloud (MIC) documentation!

This is a documentation site for our customers and partners where you can find information on how to get started with Managed IoT Cloud, the full API-documentation, all release notes and guides that go into detail on specific topics.

Core Concepts

Things

Things are representations of your physical devices in the cloud. MIC allows you to provision, manage and visualize your a large number of things. Things get access to publish and subscribe to data using thing certificates. Thing certificates are private key files that enable a secure way for your physical device to update the state of the thing in the cloud.

Domains

Domains are a way to group entities in MIC in a hierarchical structure. Each user has access to one domain and all of the domains below it by default. More access can be given by assigning additional roles to the user.

Device Shadows

The device shadow is a representation of your things state in the cloud. It is represented by a JSON document including keys for reported state, desired state and metadata. The reported state is the latest update of the thing state from your device. The desired state describes the desired values for one or more properties in the state. The desired state will stay the same until the thing processes it and reports the desired values back to MIC. Metadata holds a timestamp of when each value in the shadow was updated. Read more about device shadows in the AWS IoT documentation.

Example:

{
    "reported": {
        "hatch": "OPEN"
    },
    "desired": {
        "hatch": "CLOSED"
    },
    "metadata": {
        "hatch": {
            "timestamp": 1606231294
        }
    }
}

Observations

An observation is one data point reported by your thing. Each observation has a timestamp and can be queried by using the Platform APIs.

Resources

Resources are the names of the properties in the device shadow. In the shadow above, the only resource is hatch. Each resource has a type that controls how it can be processed by MIC. For example, resources of type long can be used by MIC to calculate an average of all observations including the resource.

Thing Types

Thing types are a way to group things with common resources. Each thing in MIC belongs to a thing type.

MQTT

MQTT is the protocol that things use to send data into MIC. The destination for a message sent over MQTT is determined by a topic. It is possible to publish messages to a topic as well as subscribe to it and listen for messages.

Data Ingestion

The most central part of MIC is the data ingestion component. This component processes the data that is reported from your things. The different stages of the data ingestion flow are described below.

Data Storage

Once the data is received from your things, MIC stores it securely and indexes it so that you can search, aggregate and analyse your data either using the App Board or your own applications.

Rule Engine

Using MIC you can configure rules for the incoming data that are processed in real time. Below are some examples of what can trigger a rule:

• One of your things enter a geographical area
• One of your things reports a value that is above, below, equal or not equal to a custom value

Rule can be configured to have multiple outputs - for example sending an email, calling a webhook or sending an SMS.

State

When data from your thing is reported into MIC, the device shadow is updated with the latest reported values.

Cloud APIs

The Cloud APIs can be used to build custom applications or fetch data stored in MIC. There are two ways to communicate with the Cloud APIs:

• REST
• GraphQL