Entities Overview

IIoTNext Platform provides the user interface and REST APIs to provision and manage multiple entity types and their relations in your IoT application. Supported entities are:

• Customers– the customer is a separate business entity: individual or organization who purchase or uses tenant devices and/or assets; Customer may have multiple users and millions of devices and/or assets;
• Users – users are able to browse dashboards and manage entities;
• Devices – basic IoT entities that may produce telemetry data and handle RPC commands. For example, sensors, actuators, switches;
• Assets – abstract IoT entities that may be related to other devices and assets. For example factory, field, vehicle;
• Entity Views – useful if you like to share only part of device or asset data to the customers;
• Alarms – events that identify issues with your assets, devices, or other entities;
• Dashboards – visualization of your IoT data and ability to control particular devices through the user interface;
• Rule Node – processing units for incoming messages, entity lifecycle events, etc;
• Rule Flow– defines the flow of the processing in the Rule Engine. May contain many rule nodes and links to other rule flows;

Each entity supports:

• Attributes – static and semi-static key-value pairs associated with entities. For example serial number, model, firmware version;
• Time-series data – time-series data points available for storage, querying and visualization. For example temperature, humidity, battery level;
• Relations – directed connections to other entities. For example contains, manages, owns, produces.

Some entities support profiles:

• Device Profiles – contains common settings for multiple devices: processing and transport configuration, etc. Each Device has the one and only profile at a single point in time.

Entity Groups:

IIoTNext Platform allows you to configure Entity Groups for Customers, Users, Devices, Assets, Entity Views, and Dashboards. Each entity may belong to multiple groups simultaneously. Entity Group always has an owner – a particular Customer. All entities in the group must have the same entity type (i.e. You can’t put device and asset into one group). Entity Groups are useful for dashboards and data processing, but the primary reason for their existence is to support advanced Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for IoT.