Best practice to manage device logs with IoT Hub

Question

Hello,

I was wondering if there are any best practices for managing logs generated by IoT devices. Currently, our devices generate logs in text files, and we thought the easiest way to manage these logs is to upload the text files to a storage account container using the IoT Hub file upload functionality. Is there a more recommended method for sending logs?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Hello Mariachiara Cesario,

Thanks for your question.

You can consider using Azure Monitor and Log Analytics to centralize and analyze your logs.

Please see below:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-hub/tutorial-use-metrics-and-diags

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-hub/monitor-iot-hub?source=recommendations

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot/iot-overview-security'

Please let me know if you have further questions.

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Answer 2

Hello Mariachiara Cesario,

welcome to this moderated Azure community forum.

It's hard to say there is one standard. This is related to the kind of device, the amount of logging, kind of connectivity, using the SDK or Azure IoT Edge.

What I have seen in the past is:

• Making use of the file upload. Perfect if you use the SDK
• Making use of sending logging as telemetry. good for incidental logging. You need to fork the telemetry stream from regular telemetry. Keep it small because it eats up a number of IoT Hub messages per day. You could write custom code to turn this on or off via a desired property wil the logging level
• Using a Direct Method to get a certain amount of logs is seen also. Azure IoT Edge offers this standard via the edgeAgent module
• Custom logging to a Storage account. You need to exchanging eg. a SAS token to keep the connection secret. Using Azure IoT Edge, Microsoft provides a specific Blob Storage Account module having a data pump towards the cloud.
• Other Custom logging towards the cloud via eg. an Azure Function or an Event Hub. Again, check out a secure solution for exchanging secrets to keep the connection secure

The file upload is actually used most. It's flexible and the security is handled by the IoT Hub, no extra logic is needed. With the addition to configure eg. the interval or level using desired properties.

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