Digital Twin Entities

ThingsBoard models the physical world as a graph of entities connected by relations. Every entity supports attributes, time-series data, and alarm rules — giving you a unified way to represent, monitor, and control your IoT infrastructure.

Entity	Purpose
Tenant	Top-level business entity that owns all other entities
Customer	Organization or individual that uses tenant devices and assets
User	Person who logs in to browse dashboards and manage entities
Device	Physical or virtual thing that publishes telemetry and handles RPC commands
Asset	Abstract object (building, field, vehicle) used to group and aggregate data
Entity View	Read-only projection of a device or asset that exposes selected telemetry and attributes
Dashboard	Visualization of IoT data with interactive widgets

Some entity types support profiles that define shared configuration for a group of similar entities:

Profile	Applies to	Configures
Device Profile	Devices	Transport protocol, rule chain, queue, alarm rules, provisioning
Asset Profile	Assets	Rule chain, queue, alarm rules

Every entity supports three types of data:

Data type	Description	Example
Attributes	Static or semi-static key-value pairs	Serial number, firmware version, location
Time-series	Timestamped data points for storage, querying, and visualization	Temperature, humidity, battery level
Relations	Directed connections between entities	Contains, Manages, Produces

Relations help model real-world hierarchies — for example, a region that contains fields, each containing multiple sensors. See Relations for details on creating, querying, and using relations in rule chains and dashboards.

Beyond the core IoT entities above, ThingsBoard provides system entities that power data processing, automation, and reporting:

Entity	Purpose
Alarm	Event that identifies an issue with a device, asset, or other entity
Alarm Rule	Condition that triggers alarm creation, severity changes, or clearing
Rule Chain	Processing pipeline that routes and transforms incoming messages
Rule Node	Individual processing unit within a rule chain
Calculated Field	Derived value computed from entity attributes or telemetry
Notification	Alert delivered via web UI, email, SMS, Slack, or other channels
Widget	Reusable UI component that displays data or accepts input on a dashboard
Edge	Remote ThingsBoard instance that synchronizes data with the cloud server
AI Model	Machine learning model used for predictions and anomaly detection
Entity Group	Custom collection of entities (devices, assets, users, etc.) for organization, access control, and bulk operations
Report	Scheduled or on-demand PDF/image export of dashboard data
Integration	Connector that ingests data from external platforms (LoRaWAN, SigFox, etc.)
Data Converter	Transforms raw payload from an integration into ThingsBoard format