Overview

The ScaleOut Digital Twins service can capture a stream of real-time messages that are sent to digital twins during a real production workload. This recording can be replayed later as part of a simulation session. This gives you the ability to tune your message processing and real-time analytics logic in realistic conditions. The source of these messages could be real devices, sensors, message hubs such as Azure IoT Hub, or applications that are using the ScaleOut Digital Twins client library to send messages to real-time digital twin models.

Message recording is started on the Message Recordings screen. Once the recording session is started, it will capture messages sent by data sources to the digital twin instances of all active real-time models. The duration of a recording is specified when starting the message recording. The active recording can be manually stopped on the Message Recordings screen. Once the recording is stopped, it will be available for use in simulations for the Message Playback simulation type. (You can learn more about that on the Starting a Simulation UI Guide topic.)

Recordings are identified by a string ID based on the date and time when the recording was started, using the following format: yyyy-mm-ddThh-mm-ss (for example, 2023-08-25T17-54-48).

Captured messages are stored on disk on each host under the root message recording folder. The path to this folder is specified in the appsettings.json configuration file of the message recording connector. The appsettings.json file is predeployed with the connector’s binaries at the following location: C:\ProgramData\ScaleOut Software\PreinstalledIG\Scaleout.MessageRecordingConnector (Windows) and /usr/share/scaleout/preinstalled-ig/Scaleout.MessageRecordingConnector (Linux). During the message recording process, the messages are added to the JSON files in a dedicated subfolder named by the ID of the currently active message recording session across all hosts that are part of the ScaleOut StreamServer cluster.

Users can manage message recordings on the Message Recordings screen. Message recordings with all captured messages can be persisted to a SQL-compliant database. Users can also stage persisted message recordings back for playing them out as a part of the simulation process.