Customer assets and IoT alerts
The required components for interacting with IoT devices are included in Customer Service Hub and Customer Service workspace.
Connected Customer Service doesn't capture the actual data from IoT devices. IoT device data telemetry is captured in an Azure IoT Hub or an Azure IoT Central app. These Azure services capture the telemetry that the device sends and can communicate with the IoT device.
The following tables are included in Connected Customer Service and are key subsets of tables that support the integration with Azure IoT.
| Table name | Description |
|---|---|
| Customer asset | Represents customer equipment that you're responsible for supporting. |
| IoT alert | Represents a notable event that is sent from an IoT Hub or IoT Central app. |
| IoT device | A connected device that is registered in IoT Hub or IoT Central. |
| IoT device category | Use to group devices to simplify the process of working with them. |
| IoT device command | A message or command that is sent to IoT Hub or IoT Central to be sent to a device. |
| Command definition | Prebuilt commands that can be sent to registered IoT devices in response to items, such as IoT Alerts. |
| Property definition | Defines a device property or a parameter that you can use in command definitions. |
Customer assets and IoT devices
With customer assets, you can keep track of equipment that you're responsible for monitoring. At their simplest, customer assets indicate which products are located at each customer location. Assets also track the service history of each asset.
With Connected Customer Service, you can connect customer assets to IoT devices that monitor the asset's health and trigger IoT alerts.
Customer assets records in Dynamics 365 Customer Service are associated with IoT device records in Connected Customer Service. Additionally, they're associated with the customer through their account and can be categorized. They can also exist in a hierarchy with parent and sub assets.
After you have associated a connected device with a customer asset, you can view IoT alerts that are raised for the device from the Customer Asset form, the details for the IoT device, and the history of the device's data.
How IoT alerts are generated in Connected Customer Service
As data from devices is captured, rules within Azure services define when an item should trigger an alert. After an alert is triggered, the data needs to be sent to Dynamics 365. Microsoft Azure Logic Apps sends it if you're using IoT Hub, and Power Automate cloud flows sends it if you're using IoT Central.
After the IoT data is available in Dynamics 365, you can build business procedures for handling it.