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Connected Field Service - Overview

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  • 3 minutes to read

Connected Field Service enables organizations to transform the way they provide service from a costly break-fix model to a proactive and predictive service model through the combination of IoT diagnostics, scheduling, asset maintenance, and inventory on the same platform.

Note

To see a video overview of Connected Field Service, you can watch one here.

Key benefits of Connected Field Service:

  • Reduce downtime by connecting to IoT devices to diagnose problems before customers are aware of an issue
  • Address issues faster by remotely monitoring devices and keeping customers in the loop
  • Device data and service maintenance data help to make intelligent decisions around dispatching technicians with the right expertise, availability, and proximity to the job

There are two ways you can use to connect IoT-enabled devices into the Field Service solution:

  • Connected Field Service for Azure IoT Hub
  • Connected Field Service for non-Azure IoT providers using the extensible IoT provider framework

Connected Field Service for Azure IoT Hub

Connected Field Service for Azure IoT Hub is an add-on solution that brings Azure IoT platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering into Dynamics365 for Field Service. With this offering, you can run a deployment app to put all the Azure IoT services and Dynamics puzzles together.

All Azure IoT services run in your own Azure cloud subscription. Additionally, we provide an enterprise-ready template that you can customize for each Azure IoT service.

Note

Currently, the Connected Field Service implementation with IoT Hub does not support splitting out telemetry data for IoT Edge modules.

Privacy details for Connected Field Service

By installing Connected Field Service for Dynamics 365, when you provide your Azure subscription information, the required Azure resources (listed below) will be deployed and your Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement instance will send data (such as commands and registrations) to Azure to enable IoT–enabled scenarios that register devices and then send and receive commands to the registered devices. An administrator can uninstall Connected Field Service to remove the functionality and then navigate to the Azure portal to manage any related Azure services that are no longer needed.

Azure components and services that are involved with Connected Field Service functionality are detailed in the following sections.

Note: For more information about additional Azure service offerings, see the Microsoft Azure Trust Center.

Service bus queue

This provides a queue for both inbound and outbound messages (commands) flowing between Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement and Azure. When an IoT alert is sent to Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement, or a command is sent from Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement to the IoT hub, it will be queued here.

Logic Apps

This provides an orchestration service that uses a Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement connector and a Queue connector. Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement connectors are used to construct entities that are specific to Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagementand Queue connectors are used for polling the queue.

Stream analytics

This provides a fully managed, real-time event processing engine that helps to unlock deep insights from data. Stream Analytics makes it easy to set up real-time analytic computations on data streaming from devices, sensors, web sites, social media, applications, infrastructure systems, and more. It is functioning as a funnel to send selective IoT alerts to Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement.

IoT Hub

Connected Field Services uses the IoT Hub to manage the state of registered devices and assets. In addition, the IoT Hub sends commands and notifications to connected devices—and tracks message delivery with acknowledgement receipts. Device messages are sent in a durable way to accommodate intermittently connected devices.

Simulator

This is a test web app to emulate the device that is sending commands or receiving commands from the IoT hub.

Azure SQL Database

Connected Field Service uses SQL Azure to store device heartbeat messages for later use by PowerBI to show the status of devices in Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement.

Azure Blob Storage

Queries that Stream Analytics will use are stored to Azure Blob storage.