Provision an Edge device

Before configuring data collection or deploying modules and application you need to provision an edge device. This quick-start will guide you through provisioning of an edge device.

Edge Devices

An edge device in Tricloud Nexus is based on Azure IoT Edge, which supports a range of OS options. To learn more about the capabilities and supported systems, see the official documentation.

Setup an Edge Device

Follow these instructions to create and connect an Edge device to Tricloud Nexus.

Prerequisites

Before provisioning an edge device and connecting it to Tricloud Nexus, you must first install a supported OS on the target computer. You must also ensure that the target computer has outbound network connectivity to a set of pre-defined hostnames, which is used during provisioning and for data collection. See this list of hostnames used by edge devices.

Create a device configuration

To provision a device in Tricloud Nexus, the first thing to do is to create a configuration for the device.

  1. First select Configurations under the Management section in the navigation menu.

  2. Then click Add in the Devices toolbar.

  3. In the New Device Configuration dialog enter a unique device id (NOTE: a device id can only contain the characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9, -, _) and then click Save.

  4. The device configuration will appear under the Unprovisioned device list

Provision the device

Once the device configuration has been created, the next step is to provision the device and connect it to Tricloud Nexus.

  1. Go to Settings under the newly created device configuration.

  2. Select Provision Device.

  3. In the Provision a Device dialog, first select the device OS (Linux or Windows) and then select the variant and version.

  4. Then select a Provisioning Endpoint, which in most scenarios is already pre-selected and then select an Enrollment option, which this quick-start guide assumes is set to Symmetric Key attestation mechanism.

  5. Then follow the on-screen instructions for:

    1. Prerequisites: login and download of the device installation script

    2. Installation: Runs the installation and provisioning script

    3. Verification: Steps to ensure that the device is provisioned and connected successfully

Verify Device Connectivity

The verification step in the provisioning dialog will test outbound connectivity from the device to the platform. It is also possible to verify connectivity from the Management Portal. Follow the steps to verify connectivity.

  1. Go to Monitoring under Operations section in the navigation menu.

  2. Expand the device tree and select the newly provisioned device.

  3. Click Ping Device in the device toolbar.

  4. A dialog will then show if the platform has connectivity to the device as shown here:

    Dialog showing the result of pinging the device

  5. Click Ok to close the dialog.

You have now provisioned a device and can continue to create an Asset Hierarchy.

Additional Setup

To ensure successful device provisioning and connectivity to Azure, the following section describes additional requirements.

Hostname Allow-list

In order to provision a device, deploy modules and ingest data to Azure, a set of public endpoints needs to be whitelisted for outbound traffic from the edge device. This list is an example and will need to be updated to the specific installation of the platform.

Name
Purpose
Hostname
Port(s)

Tricloud Nexus Support Files

Contains installation files used during device provisioning.

tricloudnexussupport.blob.core.windows.net

443

Microsoft Linux Package Repository

Official Linux package repository for IoT Edge runtime binaries.

packages.microsoft.com

443

Microsoft Artifact Registry

Official Artifact Registry for IoT Edge system container images.

mcr.microsoft.com

443

Official Tricloud Nexus Container Registry

Official Container Registry for Tricloud Nexus container images.

tricloud.azurecr.io

443

Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service

Instance specific Azure resource, used to connect devices to the platform.

global.azure-devices-provisioning.net, <instancename>.azure-devices-provisioning.net

443

Azure IoT Hub

Instance specific IoT Hub used for device management and data ingestion.

<instancename>.azure-devices.net

443, 5671, 8883

Azure Container Registry

Instance specific container registry used by edge devices to pull container images.

<instancename>.azurecr.io

443

Azure Storage Account

Instance specific cloud storage used for data ingestion.

<instancename>.blob.core.windows.net

443

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