Manage the lifecycle of an Azure IoT Operations instance

Article
2025-04-29

Use the Azure CLI and Azure portal to manage, uninstall, or update Azure IoT Operations instances.

Prerequisites

An Azure IoT Operations instance deployed to a cluster. For more information, see Deploy Azure IoT Operations.
Azure CLI installed on your development machine. This scenario requires Azure CLI version 2.53.0 or higher. Use az --version to check your version and az upgrade to update if necessary. For more information, see How to install the Azure CLI.
The Azure IoT Operations extension for Azure CLI. Use the following command to add the extension or update it to the latest version:
```
az extension add --upgrade --name azure-iot-ops
```

Manage

After deployment, you can use the Azure CLI and Azure portal to view and manage your Azure IoT Operations instance.

In the Azure portal, search for and select Azure IoT Operations.
Use the filters to view Azure IoT Operations instances based on subscription, resource group, and more.

Use the az iot ops list command to see all of the Azure IoT Operations instances in your subscription or resource group.

The basic command returns all instances in your subscription.

az iot ops list

To filter the results by resource group, add the --resource-group parameter.

az iot ops list --resource-group <RESOURCE_GROUP>

View instance

Azure portal
Azure CLI

You can view your Azure IoT Operations instance in the Azure portal.

In the Azure portal, go to the resource group that contains your Azure IoT Operations instance, or search for and select Azure IoT Operations.
Select the name of your Azure IoT Operations instance.
On the Overview page of your instance, you can see the properties of your instance. For example, you can see the status of the preview connectors, which can be enabled or disabled. To change the status of the preview connectors, click on Edit.

This action opens a configuration panel where you can enable or disable the ONVIF preview connector.
The Resource Summary tab displays the resources that were deployed to your cluster.

Use the az iot ops show command to view the properties of an instance.

az iot ops show --name <INSTANCE_NAME> --resource-group <RESOURCE_GROUP>

You can also use the az iot ops show command to view the resources in your Azure IoT Operations deployment in the Azure CLI. Add the --tree flag to show a tree view of the deployment that includes the specified Azure IoT Operations instance.

az iot ops show --name <INSTANCE_NAME> --resource-group <RESOURCE_GROUP> --tree

The tree view of a deployment looks like the following example:

MyCluster
├── extensions
│   ├── akvsecretsprovider
│   ├── azure-iot-operations-ltwgs
│   └── azure-iot-operations-platform-ltwgs
└── customLocations
    └── MyCluster-cl
        ├── resourceSyncRules
        └── resources
            ├── MyCluster-ops-init-instance
            └── MyCluster-observability

You can run az iot ops check on your cluster to assess health and configurations of individual Azure IoT Operations components. By default, the command checks MQ but you can specify the service with --ops-service parameter.

Update instances and configuration

Azure portal
Azure CLI

In the Azure portal, go to the resource group that contains your Azure IoT Operations instance, or search for and select Azure IoT Operations.
Select the name of your Azure IoT Operations instance.
On the Overview page of your instance, select Add tags or edit to modify tags on your instance.

Use the az iot ops update command to edit the features of your Azure IoT Operations instance.

To update tags and description parameters of an instance, run:

az iot ops update --name <INSTANCE_NAME> --resource-group <RESOURCE_GROUP> --desc "<INSTANCE_DESCRIPTION>" --tags <TAG_NAME>=<TAG-VALUE> <TAG_NAME>=<TAG-VALUE>

To delete all tags on an instance, set the tags parameter to a null value. For example:

az iot ops update --name <INSTANCE_NAME> --resource-group --tags ""

To enable the preview connector configuration, run:

az iot ops update --name <INSTANCE_NAME> --resource-group <RESOURCE_GROUP> --feature connectors.settings.preview=Enabled

To disable the preview connector configuration, run:

az iot ops update --name <INSTANCE_NAME> --resource-group <RESOURCE_GROUP> --feature connectors.settings.preview=Disabled

Manage components

Each Azure IoT Operations instance includes several components, like the MQTT broker, connector for OPC UA, and data flows. To learn more about managing these components, see their respective articles. For example, to manage the MQTT broker, start with Broker overview.

(Preview) Manage components using Kubernetes deployment manifests

In general, Azure IoT Operations uses the Azure Arc platform to provide a hybrid cloud experience where you can manage the configuration through Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and front-end tools like the Azure portal, Bicep, and the Azure CLI.

However, you can also manage the components of Azure IoT Operations using YAML Kubernetes deployment manifests. This means you can use tools like kubectl to manage some components of Azure IoT Operations. This feature is in preview and has some limitations:

Only some components support using Kubernetes deployment manifests. These components are the MQTT broker and data flows. Other components like the connector for OPC UA and Akri services don't support this feature.
Unless Azure IoT Operations is deployed with resource sync enabled using az iot ops create --enable-rsync, changes made to the resources using Kubernetes deployment manifests are not synced to Azure. To learn more about resource sync, see Resource sync.
Even if resource sync is enabled, brand new resources created using Kubernetes deployment manifests are not synced to Azure. Only changes to existing resources are synced.

Uninstall

The Azure IoT Operations CLI and Azure portal offer different options for uninstalling Azure IoT Operations.

Important

If you want to clean up your cluster and resource group, it's recommended to first remove Azure IoT Operations from the cluster using the Azure IoT Operations CLI commands in the following section. Then, you can delete the resource group. Deleting the resource group directly will leave orphaned resources on the cluster.

Azure portal
Azure CLI

In the Azure portal, go to the resource group that contains your Azure IoT Operations instance, or search for and select Azure IoT Operations.
Select the name of your Azure IoT Operations instance.
On the Overview page of your instance, select Delete.
Review the list of resources that are and aren't deleted as part of this operation, then type the name of your instance and select Delete to confirm.

Note

Deleting the Azure IoT Operations instance in the Azure portal doesn't remove the dependencies that were created when you deployed Azure IoT Operations. To remove these dependencies, use the az iot ops delete --name <INSTANCE_NAME> --resource-group <RESOURCE_GROUP> --include-deps command described in the Azure CLI procedure.

Use the az iot ops delete command to delete the entire Azure IoT Operations deployment from a cluster. The delete command evaluates the Azure IoT Operations related resources on the cluster and presents a tree view of the resources to be deleted. The cluster should be online when you run this command.

The delete command streamlines the redeployment of Azure IoT Operations to the same cluster. It undoes the create command so that you can run create, delete, create again and so on without having to rerun init.

The delete command removes:

The Azure IoT Operations instance
Arc extensions
Custom locations
Resource sync rules
Resources that you can configure in your Azure IoT Operations solution, like assets, MQTT broker, and data flows.

az iot ops delete --name <INSTANCE_NAME> --resource-group <RESOURCE_GROUP>

To delete the instance and also remove the Azure IoT Operations dependencies (the output of init), add the flag --include-deps.

az iot ops delete --name <INSTANCE_NAME> --resource-group <RESOURCE_GROUP> --include-deps

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