The ScaleOut Digital Twins service enables digital twin applications to integrate with a wide range of external services to assist with message processing. Physical data sources can send messages to real-time digital twins and receive replies using numerous popular messaging hubs, including Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, Amazon AWS IoT Core, Azure Kafka, and a REST web service. Messaging hubs take care of the details required for reliable message delivery.
The service also integrates with alerting providers and visualization tools. When real-time analytics code running in a digital twin detects an emerging issue, it can send an alert to operational managers using Splunk, Slack, and PagerDuty. Users can display real-time, aggregated statistics in the service’s UI or export them to Microsoft Power BI for display. These statistics update every several seconds to maximize situational awareness for a live system.
ScaleOut’s built-in integration with messaging hubs like Azure IoT Hub automatically takes advantage of multiple connections to distribute the workload and deliver fast message-processing throughput.
In addition to persisting digital twin state, ScaleOut digital twins can record incoming messages using a persistence provider and later play them back in simulation as a workload generator.
Integration with Microsoft ML.NET enables digital twins to employ cutting edge machine learning algorithms to process incoming telemetry, identify anomalies, and signal alerts.
The ScaleOut Digital Twins service optionally can retrieve and periodically persist digital twin state information using an external persistence provider, such as Microsoft SQL Server. In addition, it provides tight integration with Microsoft Azure Digital Twins as a persistence provider and a hosting platform for real-time analytics.
As a digital twin modeling platform, Microsoft Azure Digital Twins lets users employ rich features for describing their structure and a GUI tool for browsing contents and relationships. However, the platform lacks built-in support for real-time analytics. ScaleOut’s integration extends Microsoft’s service with a scalable, in-memory platform for running real-time analytics that boosts performance, enables large workloads, and simplifies the development model.