Managing data storage

The hot storage tier is an Amazon IoT SiteWise managed time series storage. Hot tier is most effective for frequently accessed data, with low write-to-read latency. Data stored in the hot tier is used by industrial applications that need quick access to the latest values of measurements in your equipment. This includes applications that visualize real-time metrics with an interactive dashboard, or applications that monitor operations and launch alarms to identify performance issues.

By default, data ingested into Amazon IoT SiteWise is stored in the hot tier. You can define a retention period for the hot tier, after which Amazon IoT SiteWise moves data in the hot tier to either warm or cold tier storage, based on your configuration. For best performance and cost efficiency, set your hot tier retention period to be longer than the time taken to retrieve data often. This is used for real time metrics, alarms, and monitoring scenarios. If a retention period is not set, your data is stored indefinitely in the hot tier.

The warm storage tier is an Amazon IoT SiteWise managed tier that's effective for cost-efficient storage of historical data. It's best used to retrieve large volumes of data with medium write-to-read latency characteristics. Use the warm tier to store historical data that's needed for large workloads. For example, it's used for data retrieval for analytics, business intelligence applications (BI), reporting tools, and training of machine learning (ML) models. If you enable the cold storage tier, you can define a warm tier retention period. After the retention period ends, Amazon IoT SiteWise deletes data from the warm tier.

The cold storage tier uses an Amazon S3 bucket to store data that's rarely used. With cold tier enabled, Amazon IoT SiteWise replicates the time series, including measurements, metrics, transforms and aggregates, and asset model definitions every 6 hours. Cold tier is used to store data that tolerates high read latency for historical reports and backups.