Cogent DataHub® (from our developer partner/publisher Skkynet) provides a wide selection of connectivity options to OPC DA, OPC UA, OPC A&E, Databases, Excel, ODBC, DDE, Linux, Modbus. As you may have already learned recently, DataHub Version 10 now includes support for integration with a wide range of common external historians. This expands your options for which data sources are compatible for historization in your chosen historian solution beyond the historian's native interfaces.
In this blog post, we'll detail how to get started integrating your data sources accessible by DataHub with AVEVA™ Insight, by writing data to your AVEVA Insight instance 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).
Part of the AVEVA™ Connect platform, AVEVA™ Insight, while acting as a cloud-based historian, goes beyond that with functionality for monitoring and analyzing asset performance, Operational Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), big data applications and more. And with publishers to most other common AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) solutions, users can bring all facets of their enterprise together for comprehensive decision making. And DataHub V10's ability to integrate data sources beyond those already accessible by Insight expands the data source options for Insight.
And even further beyond just expanding data sources, DataHub V10 provides AVEVA Insight users with the following additional capabilities:
Separately, those features all contribute to a robust and wide ranging data source for AVEVA Insight. When those features are combined, however, DataHub V10 takes your AVEVA Insight projects even further.
This post specifically covers a basic configuration for getting DataHub connected to your AVEVA Insight instance for basic historization and writing/reading data to AVEVA Insight from your process sources configured in DataHub.
The first step for integrating data with any of the external historians supported by DataHub, including AVEVA Insight, is having the data from your source or sources available 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 OPC UA servers and storing that data in a DataHub data domain named "ToAVEVAInsight". 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 Insight.
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.
Cogent DataHub V10 makes it easy to get your data into Insight as a data source. All you need is your log-in credentials for accessing your AVEVA Insight account to get started.
You don't actually need to log-in to Insight yet (though you certainly can). We just need those credentials for configuring the Insight historian connection in DataHub.
Assuming you have the data you'd like to historize in DataHub, the next step is configuring DataHub for the connection to your AVEVA Insight instance where you'd like to historize your data using the information you just gathered. For the purposes of this post, we are using an AVEVA Insight free trial but the same steps apply to fully licensed Insight accounts.
To start configuring a new AVEVA Insight connection, we go to the External Historian configuration section in DataHub and click the "Add" button:
Then select "AVEVA Insight" 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 Insight, 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. This is useful for situations where you want to conserve space in Insight. 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 instance of AVEVA Insight 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 tags in DataHub and select the ones you want to historize in AVEVA Insight.
Simply expand the tree view 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 historizing a several points from two different OPC UA servers (TOP Server simulated data and OmniServer connecting to a TPI vibration monitor).
You can also click Add Pattern to specify a regular expression that matches one or many tag names.
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 Insight, you can check the following:
From the same Asset Status Board, you can also view a trend for any of the points that DataHub is now historizing. Simply click anywhere in the Status Board to be taken to the Numeric Data section.
At the bottom, you can specify the time period. Available trends will be shown to the right of each point - clicking one and then clicking the Trend button brings up the desired trend for that point.
Now that your DataHub data is being successfully historized in AVEVA Insight, 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 Insight by DataHub, i.e. read operations are not possible for historized data in AVEVA Insight 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.
First, you must have generated and entered an AVEVA Insight API Bearer Key (as detailed above) in the DataHub Connection Settings for Insight, as well as, specifying the AVEVA Insight Data Source Name (should match the data source that was specified for logging/writing to Insight).
Simply select your AVEVA Insight 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 Insight instance 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 Insight. 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 Data Point or Points at the bottom 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 Insight. 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 Insight with the Cogent DataHub, the free trial version is available here.
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