Before you can begin receiving data from your IoT devices, you must connect them to the Platform Service. You must also create logical interfaces, which are transformed into entity types in the Analytics Service.
Analytics Service uses entity types to group incoming metrics, dimensions, and events. To create entity types, you must first create and activate logical interfaces for your data types. Each logical interface creates a new logical device type, and you can reuse that logical interface for multiple device types.
A logical interface is used to define the normalized view into the device state in Platform Service.
The following diagram illustrates how a logical interface can be used to transform multiple devices into a single device type:
Alternatively, if you do not have a physical device to connect, you can simulate device data. For instructions, see Simulating devices.
You can also customize the interface, for example, to map different incoming properties to the same logical interface property, convert temperature readings between temperature scales, or map properties to human-readable names to make them more consumable. For instructions, see the Creating interfaces from the UI topic.
If your device is sending TIMESTAMP information and you want to store this data in timestamp format in the data lake, you must manually configure the logical interface property to use the “string” property type and the “date-time” format. For instructions, see the Adding the TIMESTAMP format attribute topic.