Entities and relations
Entities Overview
NDU provides the user interface and REST APIs to provision and manage multiple entity types and their relations in your IoT application. Supported entities are:
- Tenants - you can treat tenant as a separate business-entity: individual or organization who owns or produce devices and assets; Tenant may have multiple tenant administrator users and millions of customers;
- Customers - customer is also 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;
- 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 user interface;
- Rule Node - processing units for incoming messages, entity lifecycle events, etc;
- Rule Chain - logic unit of related Rule Nodes;
Each entity supports:
- Attributes - static and semi-static key-value pairs associated with entities. For example serial number, model, firmware version;
- Telemetry 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.
Additionally, devices and assets also have a type. This allows distinguising them and process data from them in a different way.
This guide provides the overview of the features listed above, some useful links to get more details and real-life examples of their usage.
Provision entities and relations
The following is an example of entity & devices hierarchal relationship.
