Send and receive messages with IoT Hub

IoT Hub enables bi-directional communication with your devices. Use IoT Hub messaging to communicate with your devices by sending messages from your devices to your IoT solution back end, and by sending messages from your IoT solution back end to your devices.

Send device-to-cloud messages to IoT Hub

IoT Hub has a built-in service endpoint that can be used by back-end services to read telemetry messages from your devices. This endpoint is compatible with Azure Event Hubs and you can use standard IoT Hub SDKs to read from this built-in endpoint.

IoT Hub also supports custom endpoints that can be defined by users to send device telemetry data and events to Azure services using message routing.

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Send cloud-to-device messages from IoT Hub

You can send cloud-to-device messages from the IoT solution back end to your devices.

Note

Some of the features mentioned in this article, like cloud-to-device messaging, device twins, and device management, are only available in the standard tier of IoT Hub. For more information about the basic and standard/free IoT Hub tiers, see Choose the right IoT Hub tier for your solution.

Core properties of IoT Hub messaging functionality are the reliability and durability of messages. These properties enable resilience to intermittent connectivity on the device side, and to load spikes in event processing on the cloud side. IoT Hub implements at least once delivery guarantees for both device-to-cloud and cloud-to-device messaging.

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Choose the right type of IoT Hub messaging

Use device-to-cloud messages for sending time series telemetry and alerts from your device app, and cloud-to-device messages for one-way notifications to your device app.

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