Cogent DataHub is known for its extensive connectivity to OPC DA, OPC UA, OPC A&E, Databases, Excel, ODBC, DDE, Linux, Modbus. As you may have already learned, the DataHub Version 10 now includes support for integration with a wide range of common external historians, expanding your options for which data sources are compatible for historization in your chosen historian solution.
In this blog post, we'll detail how to get started integrating your data sources accessible by DataHub with AVEVA™ Historian by writing data to your AVEVA Historian while also making that same historical data available for trending, visualization and reporting for both DataHub and external historical clients supporting OPC UA Historical Access (HA).
Now AVEVA™ (formerly Wonderware) Historian users are certainly used to historizing data from SuiteLink, DDE and even OPC data sources through AVEVA Historian's own client interfaces to those data sources (and through OI Gateway, formerly FS Gateway). However, DataHub V10's ability to integrate data sources goes beyond that to provide access to many other data sources through its variety of interfaces.
And even further beyond just expanding data sources, DataHub V10 provides AVEVA Historian users with the following additional capabilities:
Separately, those features all contribute to a robust data source for AVEVA Historian. But when combined, DataHub V10 can take your AVEVA Historian projects even further.
This post specifically covers a basic configuration for getting DataHub connected to your AVEVA Historian instance and writing/reading data to AVEVA Historian from your process sources configured in DataHub.
The first step for integrating data with any of the external historians supported by DataHub, including AVEVA Historian, is having the data from your source or sources available in one or more data domains in DataHub. Whether that is data from an OPC UA or DA client or server, a DDE client or server, a database, an MQTT client or broker, a remote DataHub, a Modbus server, or one of the other many data sources DataHub supports, once it's in DataHub, it can be historized.
For example, towards the purpose of compiling the steps below, my DataHub V10 is sourcing data from an OPC server and storing that data in a DataHub data domain named "ToAVEVAHistorian". Regardless of the specific source, if the data is in a data domain in DataHub, the remaining steps in this post will help you get that data into AVEVA Historian.
Details on configuring specific data sources is beyond the scope of this post but our DataHub how-to video resources available here can help you get your data sources setup and ready for historization. You can also run DataSim or DataPid (installed with DataHub) to generate simulation data to test with.
The easiest way to confirm what the correct values are to use in DataHub for an External Historian connection to AVEVA Historian is either to ask your AVEVA Historian administrator the correct DNS hostname or IP address and the user/password you should be using or, if you have access to AVEVA Historian, launch the Administration for Historian and confirm them yourself.
This brings up the System Management Console.
Right-click on the level under Historian > Historian Group - this is the Hostname that you can use in DataHub.
Confirm here also the log-in information. If there is a specific user listed here, you'll need to find out from your AVEVA Historian administrator what the password is for that user (since it obviously won't be listed here in readable form). Alternately, if Windows authentication is being used, you'll want to make sure there is a local user or domain user that you know (or can find out) the password for is part of the "aaAdministrators" group on the AVEVA Historian machine.
Back in the System Management Console, it's also a good idea to confirm AVEVA Historian is running - you can confirm this under the Status branch under Management Console for Historian.
Assuming you have the data you'd like to historize in DataHub, the next step is configuring DataHub for the connection to the specific AVEVA Historian instance where you'd like to historize your data using the information you just gathered. For the purposes of this post, we are using Wonderware Historian 2017 but DataHub is compatible with all newer versions of AVEVA Historian, as well.
To start configuring a new AVEVA Historian connection, we go to the External Historian configuration section in DataHub and click the "Add" button:
Then select "AVEVA Historian" from the Historian Type dropdown menu:
The key settings of interest here, for a basic connection, are in the Connection Settings and Storage Settings sections.
The Connection Settings are:
And the key Storage Settings to be aware of are:
Other settings can be left at the defaults. Suffice it to say, there are additional settings that allow you to fine tune what and how much data to transmit to AVEVA Historian, such as the Data Sampling settings which allow you to send samples or "snapshots" of the data for specified time intervals to the supported historian, rather than the full data set. However, if capturing all value changes is desired, sampling settings should be left at the defaults.
In addition, DataHub also supports Forwarding of the same dataset to a separate remote instance of AVEVA Historian as a backup, which is beyond the scope of this particular blog post.
Last, but definitely not least, at that bottom of the Edit Historian Connection dialog, is the Available Points section, which provides the ability to browse the available data domains in DataHub and select the point or points from the domain or domains that you want to historize in AVEVA Historian.
Simply expand the tree view of the data domains where your desired tags are located and tick the box next to each one and ensure the desired points are added to the "Selected Points" section on the right. For this example, we're simply historizing a single changing point from the underlying OPC server.
Once you've entered the correct information, you can click "OK" and then make sure to click "Apply" back in the main Cogent DataHub interface to ensure that all of your settings take effect.
And, to confirm your DataHub is connected to AVEVA Historian, you can check the following:
AVEVA Historian users may or may not be familiar with the Query and Trend tools that install with AVEVA Historian. These are the quickest options for confirming that your desired data is being correctly historized from DataHub (and to visually access that historical data).
Setup is similar for either utility - simply specify the AVEVA Historian hostname to connect to and the same user credentials you used for your Cogent DataHub connection.
And find your tag or tags from DataHub in the Tag Picker on the left to add them to the query. You'll find them easily since they start with the data domain from DataHub.
The default Query Type is "Tag details" which isn't the most useful type so I would recommend changing this to either "History values" or "Live values" to confirm what AVEVA Historian is receiving from DataHub.
With the Trend tool, you can quickly visualize a specified range of historized data on a line trend for one or more of the tags you are historizing from DataHub.
Now that your DataHub data is being successfully historized in AVEVA Historian, it's a simple incremental step to make it possible to expose that same historized data (this is only possible for data that is being historized to AVEVA Historian by DataHub, i.e. read operations are not possible for historized data in AVEVA Historian from other sources).
NOTE: If you have more than one external historian configured in DataHub, it is only possible to select one as the read source for historical data.
Simply select your configured AVEVA Historian that we just configured for writes from the "Read values from this connection" dropdown under the Read from Historian section. Alternately, you can just check the box "Src" next to your desired AVEVA Historian under the Write data to Historians section.
Now the tags you're historizing can be used by historical clients including the internal DataHub clients QuickTrend and WebView and by external OPC UA HA capable client applications.
To quickly see this in action, we can use the DataHub QuickTrend to trend our historical data from AVEVA Historian. Just go to the QuickTrend section of DataHub and click "Open QuickTrend".
From the Data Point section at the bottom of the QuickTrend, simply select the desired tag or tags that are part of the data being historized and, on the left under "X Axis" specify the desired "Time Span" and "Update (ms)" rate. You can also adjust the scale Minimum and Maximum for the "Y Axis"
And it's just that easy to historize all of your DataHub accessible data sources to AVEVA Historian. In future posts, we will cover the more advanced features that we discussed earlier such as secure tunneling and store-and-forward and how they help you ensure all of your vital process data is there for decision making. To get started integrating your own data sources with AVEVA Historian with the Cogent DataHub, the free trial version is available here.
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