Round-trip InfluxDB Integration using OPC Router
Software Toolbox offers a variety of tools for integrating with InfluxDB. Today we focus on OPC Router, a solution that enables visual workflow integration of traditional OT data sources with time-series databases such as InfluxDB. The InfluxDB connector provides for reading and writing to InfluxDB (local or cloud-based). OPC Router's workflow engine provides visual data mapping, for ultimately extracting analytics and results from InfluxdB and making them available to the plant floor in OPC UA (or other) format.
In the video in this post which is a subset of the recently hosted IntegrateLive! Event (Episode 14), we describe a typical use case where business (and IT) requires OT data to be extended to additional databases and storage mechanisms. This satisfies the cloud storage, analytical and AI/ML requirements that manufacturers have.
We will show you how to use OPC Router to efficiently extract (read) data from an InfluxDB using the REST API (and some incredible engineering time-saving tricks too). We will then perform basic analytics on the dataset, in the form of calculating a time-weighted average, and write the result back to the Influx DB, in a new table. This is accomplished by using the InfluxDB transfer objects from OPC Router.
The last step is to make the new analytical data set (this could also be ML manipulated setpoints or anomaly predictions) can be made available to the plant floor for action, and HMI/SCADA visualization. We achieve this by converting the InfluxDB data to OPC UA tags, made available to plant floor OPC UA Servers, for further integration purposes.
To review, in this video blog, I have shown you -
- A typical use-case, consisting of various vendors and their technologies
- Configuration of OPC Router to query data from InfluxDB and applying basic analytics to the data
- Configuration of OPC Router to store calculated analytics back to InfluxDB
- How OPC Router can convert InfluxDB data to OPC UA for plant floor operations to visualize and act upon.
If you're ready to explore getting your OT data extended to IT or Cloud-hosted environments, download our free trial!
