Things

A thing is a digital representation of a physical device, an application, or a logical entity.

Each thing is categorized and is based on a thing definition that is composed of properties and characteristics required to define a thing. You can either define the characteristics of your own thing in the thing definition before creating a new thing or use an already existing thing definition. Things are instances of a thing definition and inherit their characteristics. Things are the primary items that associate data to the items that make up your IoT solution (sensors, devices, assets, programs, and so on). A thing can be something like a car, or it could be a component of a car like an engine, where a car is actually represented by multiple things. Each application connected to Device Cloud using the Service API is a thing.

A thing definition models the attributes, alarms, properties, methods, presentation information, and other characteristics of a particular type of item that is a portion of your IoT solution. Other important portions of your IoT solution can be defined to be a thing when you want to have a common set of characteristics (through a thing definition) for that portion of your solution.

Things can also have dynamic run-time items associated with them that are not inherited from their thing definitions, such as event log messages and files.