IOT Central Telemetry JSON Payload parsing stopped working

Yannic Vanherck 6 Reputation points
2022-11-15T19:04:07.42+00:00

I have 7 IOT central applications running at Industrial production companies for months at several customers without any problems. We are using native MQTT to send telemetry to the applications.

Tonight 15/11/2022 around 3:00 CET 6 out of 7 applications stopped working. From one moment into another the parsing of the JSON payloads “changed” and IOT central was no longer able to parse it. Nothing changed to the JSON files. To me it looks like Microsoft did some background changes (without any notification) in the JSON parse and introduced a breaking change in IOT central.

We have done soms quick fixes to solve it customer side, but root cause at Microsoft is still unknown.

Examles of things that change

  • arrays in json can not be parsed anymore
  • /00 of EOL at end of JSON gives an error
  • …

Does anybody here has the same issues or does anyone at Microsoft knows what happened?

Azure IoT Central
Azure IoT Central
An Azure hosted internet of things (IoT) application platform.
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  1. Yannic Vanherck 6 Reputation points
    2022-11-24T11:49:46.193+00:00

    Hello

    I opened a support case at Microsoft an received this feedback

    IoT Central currently discards invalid JSON payloads sent by devices. We are working on a feature to instead validate the JSON and mention the error on the portal so it is visible to customers.
    A change was deployed on 2022-11-15 which contained an early push of that feature that was more strict in validation.

    The original push for json validation has been rolled back so the issue will not be present for your IoT Central applications.
    We have already taken the feedback and incorporated a change to our feature and merged that change to our codebase.
    We have added support now to handle such cases (JSON array at the top level), and pushed the change to our codebase. Will be deployed in next release of this feature.

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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  2. QuantumCache 20,031 Reputation points
    2023-01-25T09:38:05.2233333+00:00

    Hello @Yannic Vanherck, Thanks for sharing the helpful information!

    Adding few more points to your answer, suggesting as general troubleshooting steps... I hope these steps will be helpful.

    We can verify the JSON Payload format that is accepted by Azure IoT Central along with updated device template properly configured. We can also verify the IoT Central app logs on Azure Portal Diagnostics section checking device template data types if causing any issue.

    Troubleshoot why data from your devices isn't showing up in Azure IoT Central

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