Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Downtime is expensive — sometimes costing thousands of dollars every minute, a line sits idle. Traditional maintenance approaches often fall into one of two traps: reacting after something breaks or replacing parts on a set schedule whether they need it or not. Predictive maintenance takes a smarter route. By combining real-time data from your equipment with machine learning, it can spot problems before they cause an outage. With OPC Router, you can efficiently route PLC and sensor data into predictive models with minimal complexity.

As technical consultants at Software Toolbox, we are often approached by users who need to expose data from a software application they have written, or are writing, to communicate from systems they own to a client, HMI/SCADA, or historian. And, in many cases, there are dozens of applications at different sites that the data needs to reach. The question we are then presented with is, “how can I accomplish this quickly and efficiently while staying within budget?” 

Our hope is to answer this question and share from our experience with OPC since 1996, what our users have told us are the common reasons why they chose to use a commercial OPC server toolkit, and to help readers determine what factors to consider for their specific situation and circumstances.

In a previous blog post, we covered the basics of commercial OPC client development toolkits, with a dive into the benefits of using one, while here in part 2, our focus is on OPC server development toolkits. If you read our blog on OPC client toolkits, you will likely notice a clear overlap in the benefits you gain from using both types of commercial OPC toolkits.

When your industrial operations depend on continuous OPC UA client-server communication, even short disruptions can ripple into major consequences. OPC UA session timeouts act as a built-in heartbeat, ensuring clients and servers know if communication has stalled so resources aren’t wasted on dead connections.

But here’s the catch: poorly tuned OPC UA timeouts can trigger needless disconnects, looping reconnections, or hide real failures that delay recovery. In critical industrial automation environments, a few minutes of uncertainty can mean lost production, safety risks, or compliance issues.

In this blog, we’ll show you why OPC UA timeouts are worth your attention, and how the right practices and tools can save you from downtime, data gaps, and unnecessary headaches.

Industrial teams often find that valuable information lives in more than one place. You can make better decisions when you have access to both live and historical data in one place. Real-time values from PLCs and sensors are essential for monitoring, but SQL databases often hold equally important information, like productions records, quality results, or business transactions. Without a way to easily and quickly connect these sources, teams may spend extra time running manual queries or waiting on reports, slowing down decision making.

Why it matters

Without connecting live and historical sources, operators and engineers are forced to piece together information from separate systems, which slows response time and increases the risk of errors. When SQL data like production orders, quality checks, or inventory status is available side-by-side with live sensor and PLC values, teams gain the full context they need to make decisions faster and with greater confidence.

Welcome back to our blog! In our previous post, Protecting Historical Data Integrity Using Store & Forward, we walked through several architectures that leverage Cogent DataHub to securely historize data while minimizing the risk of data loss. Today, we will expand on this concept by putting it into practice.

Why It Matters

Even a brief connection outage can lead to gaps in historized data, compliance risks, and lost insights. Store and Forward ensures your data is continuously captured and preserved, buffering data during interruptions and forwarding seamlessly once connections recover, so your operations stay resilient and reliable.

Are you looking for a simple way to bring live process data into Power BI for dashboards and visualization? OPC Router’s REST plug-in provides a flexible and secure way to push data from your industrial systems to Power BI using its Streaming Dataset API.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through the steps of setting up a live connection between OPC Router and Power BI using the REST interface, so you can transform your raw data into real-time insights for your team.

While this blog is geared towards existing Router users, Even if you’re new to OPC Router, this walk through can show you what’s possible when combining live industrial data with Power BI. If you’d like to explore OPC Router further, check out our getting started videos—they’ll give you the foundation you need to begin building your own real-time dashboards.

Software Toolbox attends a wide variety of customer and networking events throughout the year. Each one gives us valuable opportunities to connect with our customers, exchange ideas with peers, and gather feedback that helps us improve what we do. Some stand out because of the conversations they spark, the insights they deliver, or the energy they generate within the community. OT SCADA CON was one of those connection sparking events. In this blog, I will share some of the key takeaways I brought home from the experience.

OT SCADA CON: Fast-Paced Learning, Real-World Insights

OT SCADA CON is a unique, community-driven conference organized by the Automation Ladies and their volunteers, bringing together professionals from across the industrial automation space. While the name highlights Operational Technology (OT) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), the event essentially covers everything in the world of SCADA and beyond. Launched just last year, the conference has already doubled in size.  

In today’s fast-evolving oil and gas industry, accurate and reliable Electronic Flow Measurement (EFM) data is critical for custody transfer, regulatory compliance, and optimizing production. Yet accessing and managing that data, locked inside flow computers and RTUs can be a complex challenge.

In this blog, you’ll discover how Software Toolbox’s EFM Solutions simplify integration, ensure data reliability, and leverage open standards to seamlessly connect control systems, SCADA platforms, historians, accounting systems, and enterprise infrastructure, unlocking the full value of your flow measurement data.