Jonathan Epstein

Azure IoT Edge is a Microsoft Azure service that allows you to run containerized workloads on IoT devices. With IoT Edge and Azure IoT Hub, Azure’s device-management platform, organizations across science, manufacturing, energy production, and other industries can provision their IoT devices and workloads at the edge of their cloud networks for immediate in-unit computing, a necessity when running AI algorithms or parsing large datasets directly on IoT devices.

Because IoT infrastructure is widely distributed and may contain multiple types of devices or software versions, monitoring the full scope of your system can be a challenge. To help Azure users expand their IoT monitoring reach, we’re excited to announce that Datadog now integrates with IoT Edge. You can easily deploy the Datadog Agent across all of your connected Azure IoT Edge devices using Azure IoT Hub. Once you’ve installed the Agent, Datadog’s integration automatically ingests both device and module metrics and logs. Datadog’s customizable out-of-the-box Azure IoT Edge dashboard visualizes key metrics from your devices, modules, and IoT Edge Hub(s), including device RAM and CPU usage, module operation latency, client connections and hub syncs, and network throughput, giving you immediate insight into your entire IoT infrastructure.

Monitoring on the edge

Devices running IoT Edge execute workloads through modules, which are portable, Docker-compatible containers that you can deploy to your devices via the IoT Hub. Each IoT Edge device in your fleet runs two modules that are its primary runtime components: the IoT Edge Agent and the IoT Edge Hub.

The IoT Edge Agent manages the other modules on the device, monitoring their status and ensuring they are running. The IoT Edge Hub acts as a communication manager between modules on your devices. The IoT Edge Hub also forwards device telemetry to the IoT Hub in order to synchronize communication between your devices and the rest of your cloud infrastructure.

Datadog’s integration includes built-in service checks that help you keep track of the health and connectivity of the IoT Edge Agents and IoT Edge Hubs across your entire fleet. You can easily set alerts to notify you if devices go offline unexpectedly.

Monitor your IoT Edge Agents and IoT Edge Hubs

Azure IoT Edge lets you run advanced applications on your remote devices, so it’s essential to closely monitor the health and performance of both your devices and the modules they are running. Tracking IoT Edge Agent and IoT Edge Hub metrics allows you to spot a multitude of problems, including insufficient memory, lack of communication between devices and the Azure IoT Hub, increased latency, and more.

Because Datadog also collects logs from your devices, once you spot a metric anomaly, you can quickly pivot to relevant logs to investigate its underlying factors to try to troubleshoot a cause. For example, if you see a spike in failed syncs between the IoT Edge Agent and the IoT Edge Hub (azure.iot_edge.edge_agent.unsuccessful_iothub_syncs_total) on a device, you can immediately surface all of the device and module logs ingested during that time frame for greater context around what might have caused the problem, as seen in the screenshot below. And because Datadog integrates with more than 1,000 technologies, you can surface correlations across your entire stack.

Similarly, if the client modules on your devices fail to connect to the IoT Edge Hub (azure.iot_edge.edge_hub.client_connect_failed_total) it could represent a module misconfiguration. You can easily set up an alert on this metric to notify your team if a device’s hub queue length (azure.iot_edge.edge_hub.queue_length) exceeds a chosen value, which could indicate a connection failure, letting you take immediate action to address the communication failure before further issues with your edge network occur.

Take the edge off

Datadog’s Azure IoT Edge integration gives you unparalleled visibility into the functionality of your Azure edge network—and, alongside our Azure IoT Hub integration, your entire Azure IoT infrastructure. If you’re already a Datadog customer, see our documentation to get started using the IoT Edge integration right now. Otherwise, get started with a free 14-day trial.