Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Cogent DataHub enables a wide range of connectivity interfaces for different data sources such as OPC UA, OPC DA, ODBC, DDE and so much more.  This makes DataHub a flexible gateway commonly used for data integration by external software such as HMI, SCADA, MES, historians and other client applications.

In this video blog, I'll show you how to use DataHub V10's support for OPC UA Alarms & Conditions to enable OPC Classic Alarms & Events servers to work with newer OPC UA clients supporting Alarms & Conditions.

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). 

For various reasons, many organizations still have one or more disconnects between the PLCs and other control devices closest to the ultimate process and the upstream systems responsible for coordinating efforts across the enterprise. In an ideal world, all data exchange between all systems in an enterprise would be automated for the greatest efficiency.

In this post (based on the article "Removing five critical media gaps" by our partner company, inray Industriesoftware GmbH), we will discuss five of the most common gaps where an organization's ERP system may still be disconnected from underlying processes and data sources. And we'll discuss how OPC Router provides the ability to eliminate those unnecessary gaps.

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.

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 adds a huge amount of new or expanded functionality that further confirms our saying that "once the data is in DataHub, it can go anywhere".

In this blog post, I'll provide insight into key new features including support for OPC UA Alarms & Conditions, support for Sparkplug B for both the MQTT Client and Broker, support for reading and writing with multiple popular external historians and more. Not only will I cover what these new functionalities provide but how they can help you deliver secure, integrated connections within and between your plants, to the cloud and beyond, giving you the data and perspective you need to make critical decisions for your enterprise.

If you've seen our other, more detailed posts (specifically our Exploring OPC UA post and the DataHub OPC UA video how-to) on getting Cogent DataHub working with OPC UA clients and servers, you are probably already familiar with configuring Cogent DataHub for secure access from an OPC UA client. However, we are commonly asked how to quickly get the DataHub OPC UA server interface ready for an OPC UA client to securely connect for accessing data from the variety of other interfaces that DataHub supports.

Continuing our Tech Support Corner blog series, this short post covers just the basics for setting up the Cogent DataHub OPC UA server interface to use the highest level of security and to require a client to specify a username and password for authentication.

Following on the recent OPC Data Client 2021.2 release a few months ago, the OPC Data Client toolkit has been updated again to further extend it's OPC UA client functionality. 

The new updates provide developers of custom OPC client applications with new operating system support, even more examples including Powershell examples, and a large number of improvements to all the supported OPC interfaces to increase flexibility, troubleshooting, and user experience, while further decreasing development time. 

OmniServer's connectivity and data parsing capabilities are its primary job; however, they are only part of how OmniServer helps with integrating non-standard devices with Inductive Automation's Ignition HMI/SCADA.  How does the device data actually make it into Ignition and what devices can you connect Ignition to using OmniServer?

In this video blog, I'll show you how to use OmniServer for TPI to integrate vibration data into Ignition via an OPC UA client connection from Ignition to OmniServer - all without the expense and headaches of having to write custom code.