This post will cover a common ask for customers. How to display, report, or dashboard data locally, even when offline, from Azure IoT Edge
One of the main uses for IoT is to be able to have dashboards and reports showing the latest information off of IoT devices. Often that happens with data sent from the devices to the cloud. In many IoT scenarios, especially in manufacturing, those dashboards also serve the needs of local operators or supervisors in the very plants or locations that supply that IoT data. So often that data “round trips” from the device, up to Azure, then the reports back down to screens at the plant.
But what happens if you need lower latency reporting? Or you lose your Internet connection frequently because your plant is in an area with slow or unreliable connectivity?
A common ask from customer is to, in addition to sending the IoT data to Azure for centralized reporting, ML model training, etc to also have the data ‘reported/dashboarded’ locally. That allows for lower latency display, as well as continued operation in the event of an Internet failure.
To address this need, I’m happy to announce that Azure IoT Global Black Belt counterparts have published guidance and a sample implementation on how to do just this. The sample implementation happens to be a common manufacturing KPI called Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), but could be adapted to many other scenarios such as retail stores, warehouses, etc.
Please check it out at our github repo -> https://github.com/AzureIoTGBB/iot-edge-offline-dashboarding
Enjoy! And, as always, hit me up in the comments if you have questions.