Software Toolbox Technical Blog

The adoption of OPC UA technology continues to grow more with each passing year.  And for good reason.  OPC UA provides a means to encrypt data as it is transferred between client and server that other client interface options simply do not. But when it comes time to have that discussion with your IT department around whether they are going to let you run OPC UA inside the firewall on a network, they likely will have concerns centered around common IT concerns in networks. 

Continuing our Tech Support Corner blog series, this post covers some common concerns that our support engineers have encountered from process engineers collaborating with their IT department about OPC UA client's and servers running on their network and the factors to consider in those discussions. 

Access to various industrial data via RESTful web services is increasingly becoming necessary in this era of inter-connectivity and big data. From sources such as devices with self-hosted web services to relevant market data such as weather information and pricing for commodities and energy, there is a host of relevant data to be integrated from such RESTful web services.

In this video training blog post, we will cover step-by-step how to easily connect to and consume data from RESTful web services and then push that data to OPC and SQL systems with the OPC Router.

Many of the great questions in life begin with the word ‘where’. Where do we come from? Where are we going? Where should I install my LGH File Inspector?

While I cannot provide a whole lot of input on the first two questions, I do have some suggestions on where to install your LGH File Inspector.

In this Tech Support Corner blog post, we will explore some common factors that we have seen impact, or drive, the ideal placement of an LGH File Inspector installation – a question that we get quite commonly from users like you.

As we discussed in Part 1 of our OPC Router Basic Training series, it is quite common for process industry projects to require logging of industrial process data to a database such as Microsoft SQL.  On the other side of the coin, it is also quite common for information such as recipes or other data to be stored in a database such as SQL and to then need to push that data down to process devices.

In Part 2 of the series, we will cover step-by-step how to write stored SQL data to OPC UA and DA servers based on flexible scripted trigger conditions with the OPC Router.

Logging industrial process data to a database such as Microsoft SQL is a common requirement of many projects across industries.  One of the key applications for storing industrial process data is providing historical context and reporting of the process so that better decisions can be made.

In Part 1 of our OPC Router Basic Training series, we will cover step-by-step how to easily connect to OPC UA and DA data sources to SQL databases for logging process data with the OPC Router.

Having ready access to the wide array of industrial data available in an enterprise is increasingly important these days, for a variety of reasons.  With ever-expanding applications for using "big data" towards efficiency initiatives such as digital twins, predictive analytics and predictive maintenance, having the ability to bring all of your industrial data together is essential.

In order to analyze that data, however, the upstream systems performing that analysis need access to the actual data - data that is typically widely dispersed geographically and even departmentally within locations.  One interface that is relatively common for such systems is the ability to act as an HTTP (or REST) client.

This blog post will provide an overview of an easy and secure way to share industrial process data available common OPC UA, OPC DA and SQL database sources with big data and other systems that can act as an HTTP / REST Client using the OPC Router. You'll also have a chance to download our free guide with step-by-step instructions.

So far in our ongoing Exploring OPC UA blog series, we have taken a primarily general look at OPC UA Certificates and how they are used by OPC UA clients and OPC UA servers to keep industrial data secure.

In this third post of the series, we'll take a step back and look at OPC UA security in general with respect to the layered approach that is employed to cover aspects such as authentication, confidentiality and the integrity of communications.

In the first post of our ongoing Exploring OPC UA blog series, we covered the three functions that OPC UA Certificates (also known as Application Certificates) serve in the context of OPC UA security.

In this second post, we'll take a look at what happens to messages after you have trusted the application certificates and have enabled security on the OPC UA endpoint. Specifically, what does Sign&Encrypt mean on an endpoint and how can we be sure that the data is truly secure.