We’re architecting an asset tracking solution for 5,000+ industrial assets transmitting location and sensor telemetry every 30 seconds. The debate in our team is whether to use AWS IoT Core with custom time-series storage or AWS IoT SiteWise’s built-in asset modeling and time-series database.
From a performance perspective, I’m curious about real-world experiences with ingestion rates, query latency for historical data analysis, and operational overhead. IoT Core gives us flexibility but requires building the entire analytics stack ourselves. SiteWise provides the asset model and time-series storage out of the box, but I’m concerned about query performance at scale and cost implications.
Has anyone compared these approaches for high-frequency asset tracking? What were the performance trade-offs you encountered? Particularly interested in query latency when analyzing 30-day windows of data across hundreds of assets simultaneously.
We evaluated both last year for a similar use case (3,200 assets, 1-minute intervals). IoT Core with Timestream gave us better query performance - sub-second response for 30-day aggregations across 500 assets. SiteWise queries were taking 8-15 seconds for equivalent datasets. The operational overhead with IoT Core was higher though - we had to build our own asset hierarchy management.
For edge buffering, both require Greengrass or custom edge logic. SiteWise has a Greengrass connector that handles buffering automatically, which is nice. With IoT Core, you’re building that buffering yourself. The SiteWise connector can buffer up to 7 days of data locally during connectivity loss, which is robust for industrial environments.
The cost comparison is eye-opening. We have 8-12 properties per asset, so SiteWise could get expensive quickly. What about ingestion reliability during network outages? Does SiteWise handle edge buffering better than a custom IoT Core solution?
Cost is a huge differentiator. SiteWise charges per property per month plus query costs. For 5,000 assets with 10 properties each at 30-second intervals, you’re looking at $5,000-7,000/month just for ingestion. IoT Core + Timestream is more predictable - roughly $2,000-3,000/month for equivalent volume. The query performance gap mentioned above is real, but SiteWise’s asset modeling saves weeks of development time.