Software Toolbox Technical Blog

In the ever-growing digital landscape of manufacturing operations, single use solutions & applications may solve issues, but also create their own data silos. These silos present multiple challenges (limited visibility, slower decision-making, security blind spots) and lead to missed opportunities due to the complex management of varying solutions. For example, OPC HDA is a standard utilized for collecting and sharing historical data across industrial automation technology solutions. Based on the standards of OPC DA, integration challenges arise due to the dependency of COM and remote DCOM connections, creating incompatibility with newer solutions and technologies.

Today we'll explore how Cogent DataHub was used to solve many of these integration headaches and silos by providing a middleware platform for connectivity between a variety of protocols and technologies. With the latest major revision of Cogent DataHub V11, the ability to collect historical OPC HDA data is now possible with the addition of the OPC HDA Client capability.

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.

If you use OPC UA, you are likely at least somewhat familiar with OPC UA certificates. OPC UA client and server applications typically have Application Instance Certificates to provide application-level security. They are used for establishing a secure connection using Asymmetric Cryptography.

OPC UA certificates include a digital signature by the generator of the certificate. This digital signature can be self-signed or can be signed by a Certificate Authority (CA). Both types of certificates provide the same level of security and can be used in Asymmetric Cryptography. The major difference between CA signed and self-signed certificates in an OPC UA installation is the effort required to deploy and maintain the certificates. The choice of when to use a CA issued certificate versus a self-signed certificate depends on the installation and site requirements.

Many of our products leverage the OPC UA Configuration tool from the OPC Foundation to create and trust certificates and certificate authorities (CA). This tool actually installs with our OPC Data Client toolkit but is also available from the OPC Foundation. But how do we navigate this tool and the use of OPC UA certificates as a whole?

In this blog post, we will cover both methods of UA certificate signing, as well as the tool mentioned above for easily managing UA certificates for your OPC UA applications.

Continuing our Exploring OPC UA blog series, we're still going into the specifics of OPC UA security configuration in key Software Toolbox solutions that are OPC UA capable.

In this ninth post of the series, we will focus on OPC Router, focusing on stepping through what the settings are in OPC Router and how to get connected both for your OPC UA clients and servers.

If you've been following our ongoing Exploring OPC UA blog series, we've been covering key Software Toolbox solutions and the specifics of configuring OPC UA security and connectivity.

In this eighth post of the series, we will focus on the OPC Data Client development toolkit, with the primary topic being how to exchange security certificates and establish a trust relationship between your custom OPC UA client and an OPC UA server.

If you've been following our ongoing Exploring OPC UA blog series, we've been covering key Software Toolbox solutions and the specifics of configuring OPC UA security and connectivity.

In this seventh post of the series, we will focus on OPC Data Logger, specifically stepping through settings related to security, endpoints and certificate management and connecting OPC Data Logger to OPC UA servers for logging data.

As you may have seen in our recent posts in our ongoing Exploring OPC UA blog series, we've been going into the specifics of OPC UA security configuration in key Software Toolbox solutions that are OPC UA capable.

In this sixth post of the series, we will focus on Cogent DataHub, focusing on stepping through what the settings are in DataHub and how to get connected both for your OPC UA clients and servers.

In our ongoing Exploring OPC UA blog series, we have shifted the focus from general concepts about how OPC UA certificates and security work to looking at practical usage of OPC UA in specific Software Toolbox solutions. Last time, we focused on configuring TOP Server for OPC UA connectivity.

In this fifth post of the series, we will focus on OmniServer, our solution for getting data from non-standard devices into OPC UA and other client applications. We'll step through what the settings are in OmniServer and how to get your OPC UA client applications connected.