News

AWS IoT Analytics Emerges from Preview

• By David Ramel
• 04/30/2018

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) announced the general availability of its Internet of Things (IoT) analytics service unveiled as a preview last fall.

AWS IoT Analytics is a fully managed service enabling simple and sophisticated analytics on massive volumes of data from sensors and other IoT-connected devices, the company said.

The service provides the basics of IoT data analysis: collection, processing, storage, in-depth query analysis and visualization.

"AWS IoT Analytics includes data preparation capabilities that are designed specifically for common IoT use cases like predictive maintenance, asset usage patterns, and failure profiling," the company said in announcing the preview service last November. "IoT Analytics captures data from devices connected to AWS IoT Core, and filters, transforms, and enriches it before storing it in a time-series database for analysis."

Last week, the company took the wraps off the preview, making it generally available in three U.S. regions and one in Ireland, with more on tap.

As noted, it works with IoT Core, launched in 2015 and updated in February with easier device connection.

"AWS IoT Analytics collects, pre-processes, enriches, stores, and analyzes IoT device data at scale so companies can identify things like the average distance traveled for a fleet of connected vehicles, or how many doors are locked after work hours in a smart building, or assess the performance of devices over time to predict maintenance issues and better react to changing environmental conditions," the company said in a statement.

Besides being able to run queries on IoT data, other features of the service include:

• Support of time-series analyses so organizations can analyze the performance of devices over time
• Storage of processed device data in a time-series data store optimized for fast response times on IoT queries that typically include time among criteria
• Tools for machine learning, supporting hosted Jupyter notebooks that facilitate directly connecting IoT data to a notebook and building, training, and executing models right from the IoT Analytics console, obviating the management of underlying infrastructure
• Support of data preparation techniques to ease preliminary setup and processing of data for analysis
• Automated scaling with pay-as-you-go pricing

"AWS IoT Analytics automates each of the difficult steps that are required to analyze data from IoT devices," AWS said. "IoT Analytics filters, transforms, and enriches IoT data before storing it in a time-series data store for analysis. You can setup the service to collect only the data you need from your devices, apply mathematical transforms to process the data, and enrich the data with device-specific metadata such as device type and location before storing the processed data.

"Then, you can analyze your data by running ad hoc or scheduled queries using the built-in SQL query engine, or perform more complex analytics and machine learning inference."

Pricing of the new service is detailed here.