Amazon IoT Device Management FAQs

Q. What is Amazon IoT Device Management?

Amazon IoT Device Management is a service that makes it easy to securely onboard, organize, monitor, and remotely manage IoT devices at scale throughout their lifecycle. You can use IoT Device Management to upload and view device information and configuration, organize your device inventory, monitor your fleet of devices, and remotely manage devices deployed across many locations including updating device software over-the-air (OTA). With IoT Device Management, you can scale your device fleets and reduce the cost and effort of managing large IoT device deployments.

Q. What are the components of IoT Device Management?

IoT Device Management adds four main components (Device Provisioning, Fleet Indexing and Search, Fine-grained logging, and Device Jobs).

Device Provisioning: Allows the bulk registration of device identity, manages device authorization, credential management, and policy-based access for devices.

Fleet Indexing and Search: Fleet Indexing and Search provides attribute-based search on a customer’s Registry and Device Shadow. It allows customers to quickly find devices based on a combination of attributes and state.

Fine-grained Logging: This allows customers to configure the log levels for device groups so that they only monitor the information that they need. A customer can set one device group to record all logs, and set another group to only log errors.

Device Jobs: Device Jobs runs and monitors software updates and other remote operations such as device reboots. It lets you manage updates to a single device or to your entire fleet. You can control the pace of deployment (e.g. deploy to 10 devices per second), and receive real-time information about the status of your jobs as they’re deployed to your devices.

Q. How does IoT Device Management help with device organization?

IoT Device Management simplifies device organization by allowing you to group your device fleet into a hierarchical structure based on function, security requirements, or any other category. You can group one device in a room, group devices together that operate on the same floor, or group all the devices that operate within a building. Then, you can use these groups to manage access policies, view operational metrics, or perform actions on your devices across the entire group.

Q. How does IoT Device Management help with device updates?

IoT Device Management allows customers to push remote actions such as software and firmware updates to patch security vulnerabilities and improve device functionality. Customers can create jobs on groups of things and can configure the rollout speed across things. To execute a device job, you choose your targets, provide a job document that details the action for your devices to take, and choose the type of job (snapshot or continuous). Snapshot jobs will end after all targets have received the job, while continuous jobs will never end until canceled – the advantage of this is that any new devices added to a continuous job will be automatically sent the job file.