Together with my colleague Sander van de Velde, we are hosting the in-person “Experience the basics of Azure IoT, Dashboarding … and beyond” workshop at the next BitBash event on January 26, Veenendaal, The Netherlands. BitBash Bitbash is an in-person event that’s free to attend. It’s held on Friday, January 26, and Saturday, January 27 at Info Support HQ in Veenendaal, The Netherlands. Our workshop is on Friday 26th of January from 09:00 to 12:00 in room 3. Registration starts at 8.30. A lunch is provided. Check the agenda for a second workshop in the afternoon. The Saturday is full of o ..read more

Change Data Capture (CDC) is a design pattern to only track the changes in data. There are several ways this could be implemented. In IoT solutions, the Change Data Capture (CDC) pattern is used, to only send changes from the device to the cloud. But how to deal with this data in Azure Data Explorer for further analysis? In my last article, we looked at an IoT implementation with Change Data Capture (CDC), and how to deal with it within Azure Data Explorer by saving snapshots of the calculated values with an Azure Function. In this article, we investigate a somewhat different approach by using ..read more

Change Data Capture (CDC) is a design pattern to only track the changes in data. There are several ways this could be implemented. In IoT solutions, the Change Data Capture (CDC) pattern is used, to only send changes from the device to the cloud. But how to deal with this data in Azure Data Explorer for further analysis? In this article, we look at an IoT implementation with Change Data Capture (CDC), and how to deal with it within Azure Data Explorer. Implementation In many IoT solutions, we see an implementation where the cloud only receives a value when it is changed. In the screenshot belo ..read more

Azure Bastion is a service that allows you to connect securely to a virtual machine via RDP or SSH in the Azure portal with a browser. No public IP address is required which helps to limit threats. Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/nl-nl/azure/bastion/bastion-overview It is very simple to implement because it’s integrated in the Azure portal. Just open a virtual machine, select “Bastion” in the menu as way to connect. This first time, click on “Create Azure Bastion using defaults” and its ready to use. Now, you can connect using Bastion every time you need to access the virtual machine. The ..read more

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article “Deploy IoT Edge modules at scale with layered deployments“. In that article, I created a layered deployment manually. But what if you have multiple IoT hubs, should we configure each IoT hub by hand? I hope not, so this was the starting point in my search for integrating the (layered) deployments into Infrastructure as code (IaC). Bicep The first thing I looked into was Bicep, because this connected nicely with my article “Setting up a IoT hub with Bicep” and in my mind this was the most obvious solution. Microsoft has enabled almost all Azure resour ..read more

Creating a IoT hub within the Azure portal is a piece of cake, so why should we use Bicep and what is Bicep anyway. In this article, I will explain about Bicep and we will create a simple Bicep example to deploy an IoT hub. Bicep Bicep is a language, like ARM (but much easier to understand), to deploy resources to Azure. The definition of the infrastructure is stored in a Bicep file. Bicep files can be deployed manually or can be deployed by Azure DevOps pipelines. Because the definition of the infrastructure is stored in files, deployments are consistent and repeatable. The Bicep files can al ..read more

Azure Data Explorer is a fast and powerful Azure service for analyzing real-time data. All of the IoT projects I worked on lately, we used Azure Data Explorer. Mostly for the (data) engineer to, for example, analyze the data or to identify anomalies. But Azure Data Explorer is less suitable for some users because of the special (Kusto) query language. The new dashboard feature is a good addition for this problem. A data engineer can prepare a dashboard and users don’t need to have any knowledge about Kusto. Let’s see how to create a dashboard in Azure Data Explorer. Prepare cluster and sample ..read more

On my latest project, we encountered some strange behavior in the Azure Storage Account. The number of transactions were extremely high, which resulted in unexpected costs. In this article, I will explain the situation and how we solved it. Situation We have an IoT hub with a “message route” which stores the DeviceConnectionStateEvents into an Azure Storage Account. The DeviceConnectionStateEvents are stored as blob files into a container. Then, a BlobTriggered Azure Function App picks up the blob files after begin triggered. The files are read and the content is sent to an Event Hub. After a ..read more

What if you have two blobs in an Azure Storage Account and a user is suppose to have access to only one of them. To illustrate this, see the image below, the user should only have access to blobs of project Coffee. You may solve this by adding an extra Storage Container, move one of the files to the new container and create an authorization based on the containers. This is one option, but it may not fit well in your environment. Another possibility is to add authorization based on attributes, called attribute-based access control (ABAC). Attribute-based access control (ABAC) builds on role-ba ..read more

In case 4 of the Kusto Detective Agency, you need to search for a hacker that hacked into the Digitown municipality system and stole documents. All you got is a 30-day traffic statistics report captured by the Digitown municipality system network routers. After the challenge, I wondered, can I get more information about the hacker, like where the hacker is located. Let’s play and dive deeper into the data… Note: Not to spoiler anything, I didn’t include screenshots or any queries based on my answer. Geographic functions Azure Data Explorer supports multiple geographic functions. In this case ..read more