This tutorial will take you step-by-step of how to connect your PLCs to Microsoft Azure IoT Hub and getting started streaming data. 

Connecting your PLCs and industrial controllers to Azure opens up a lot of opportunities and possibilities for utilizing their data in their enterprise cloud infrastructure.
Just to name a few possibilities in Azure:

• Visualize in Power BI or Time Series Insight
• Combine with Microsoft Dynamics ERP solution
• Store in databases 
• Build Web Apps on top of the data

Before this can be done we need to get the data to Azure's IoT Hub and from there e.g. Stream Analytics jobs can stream it to the proper destination in Azure.

This guide will show you the steps of connecting the data from PLCs and into the IoT Hub. Connecting the PLCs tags and data only requires a few steps that will be described in this tutorial.

Configuring SIA Connect to send and receive data from PLCs to Azure

So, Azure is ready. Now the final steps is to stream the PLCs data into the IoT Hub's device. 

Achieving this might contain the following steps:

1. Add the Azure IoT Hub as instance on SIA Connect‍ 
2. Locate the vendor and/or protocol to be used by SIA Connect to communicate with it
   1. Install the Connector on SIA Connect that supports the PLCs protocol‍
   2. Add the PLC as a instance on SIA Connect‍ 
3. Find out which variables/tags to read from the PLC
   1. Add the variables/tags as items on SIA Connect‍ 
4. Map PLC items to the Device-to-cloud item in the Azure instance‍ 
   1. Customize your payload to contain the metadata you wish to send to Azure IoT Hub‍ 
5. Validate the data is streaming into Azure IoT Hub‍ by monitoring the messages using Azure CLI tool‍ 

After this you can play around with how your payload to Azure should look like and what meta data you would like to add. 

Video tutorial

The below video shows how to connect and make a tunnel between an Allen-Bradley instance and Azure IoT Hub.