Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Welcome back to the Summer of IoT Blog Series. In this blog we’ll explore how Cogent DataHub’s External Historian and built-in Store and Forward features ensure efficient data flow without risking network security at the plant or enterprise level.

As organizations work toward Industry 4.0 and digital transformation, ensuring secure and reliable OT/IT convergence is essential for breaking down data silos and creating cohesion between your business systems. IoT devices provide real-time data and connectivity to transform traditional industrial operations. Complementing this, historians serve as centralized data repositories that store and organize time-series data from IoT devices and other sources. Together, the data from both fuels advanced analytics, automation, and smart decision-making across the enterprise.

If you’ve ever had to dig into historical data, you know that being able to easily access and understand it is key for gaining insights and decision making. Without the right tools, retrieving and reporting on historical data can quickly turn into a nightmare – leaving you dreaming of a better option. In today’s age of digital transformation, Dream Report gives you easy access to accurate data, allowing you to maintain a competitive edge, make informed decisions, and leave your nightmares in the past. 

In this blog post and accompanying video, you’ll learn how to use TOP Server’s Local Historian Plug-In with Dream Report to quickly capture and visualize historical data—revealing hidden trends in just 8 minutes.

You can make more confident and informed decisions when you have accurate and relevant data to base those decisions on. Operational data is crucial because it enables you to track performance, quickly identify issues, and make decisions based on up-to-date information, resulting in enhanced efficiency and effectiveness.

With the Industry 4.0 hot topics of AI, Big Data, IoT, and countless others, many of the long-standing technologies that power many industries are left out of the limelight. For many users, OPC and SQL databases are well known and have been the basis for many simplified data collection projects for years. For others, there are still new and growing requirements to digitize data and interconnect a variety of sources into an easily accessible and manageable location. With Software Toolbox’s large variety of solutions we help both big and small companies alike meet their needs.

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). 

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). 

Cogent DataHub is known for its extensive connectivity to OPC DA, OPC UA, OPC A&E, Databases, Excel, ODBC, DDE, Linux, Modbus.  The latest Version 10 release expands connectivity to include a wide range of common external historian solutions for historizing industrial data and integrating historized data with other systems.

In this blog post, we'll highlight some specific key details about which historians are supported and how other DataHub functionality works with those historians to provide flexible options.

An often important task when logging important process data to a database or even to the cloud is verification that the data has been logged. This ensures that data has been successfully logged and will not be lost when overwritten in the downstream process.

In this video blog, we'll step through the configuration required in the OPC Data Logger for logging important process data to a database on condition related to a monitored item and how to perform a writeback to the OPC data source confirming the data has been successfully logged.

With the advent of cloud-based solutions in every industry, it's only natural that you might need to migrate from a traditional locally-hosted SQL database for logging your process data to Azure. Fortunately, logging both to traditional SQL and Azure SQL are similar in many ways and OPC Data Logger makes it possible to log to both for OPC UA and DA data sources.

In this video blog, we'll review the basic setup and architecture for OPC Data Logger and then step through the configuration required for logging to SQL and Azure SQL from an OPC server.