Software Toolbox Technical Blog

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.

Happy belated Earth Day! We hope you took the time on Tuesday to enjoy the great outdoors or made a plan to get outside this weekend. Perhaps you did neither and instead decided to put your reusable water bottle to use instead of grabbing another plastic bottle of water to drink from for the day. Whatever you did, we hope it made you happy because that’s part of what celebrating Earth Day is all about.

In this final post of our 2025 Environmental Sustainability blog series, we’re diving into how industries can make smarter, greener decisions using actionable RESTful web services. I know that may sound like a stretch to connect these things, but keep reading: I’m going to discuss the technology, the data sources that you can consume to impact your sustainability results, and how you can bring them together without writing any code.

Each year, National Napping Day recognizes our need for rest the day following the return of daylight saving time, when many of us shift our clocks forward one hour. If you are one of the many who "sprang forward" this past Sunday, we hope you have been able to catch up on your rest over the past several days. Today, however, we’re going to talk about a different kind of "REST" and how it can help you spring forward in your OT/IT integration goals and Industry 4.0 initiatives.

From Canary to AVEVA CONNECT, many technologies include a RESTful interface that can be leveraged when other avenues are unavailable. In this blog, you’ll learn how you can take advantage of RESTful APIs to easily integrate systems that do not have a native way to interact with each other, resulting in a standardized, scalable, and secure way to exchange data between enterprise IT systems and industrial OT environments.

In the ever-changing landscape of industrial control, the ability to establish connections and facilitate efficient data exchange between different technologies is crucial. With digital transformation, the industry requires robust integration solutions more than ever before. This is where the powerful combination of OPC Router, it's ability to both call and host REST APIs using industrial data, and OAuth 2.0 comes into play, enabling organizations to achieve secure and streamlined communication across their automation and other systems.

OPC Router is a standards based tool for data integration from the shop floor through all levels even up to ERP systems, with a visual workflow engine, scalable configuration templates, and integration to many OT and IT systems. Leveraging OPC UA, REST, SOAP, MQTT and more, it can be an essential enabling tool for your Industry 4.0 applications. Solutions can be extended using C# scripting, and this blog shows a live built example of how to efficiently use Visual Studio to build those scripts. 

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a file format that has become fairly common in the industrial automation industry for storing data or information (including such things as configuration files). But also as one of the most common data formats used by RESTful APIs and web services, which are commonly used for providing a range of useful information including energy prices and weather data.

Sometimes, of course, depending on the application, some or all components of JSON packet might be variable or dynamic in nature, which can make it difficult for off-the-shelf industrial software solutions to properly parse the information from those packets.

In this post, I will cover step-by-step how to leverage the scripting capabilities of the OPC Router to access and parse JSON packets either from a JSON file saved to a specific file directory or from a RESTful web service after which that data can be used with any of the other connectors that OPC Router supports. For this example, we log the data to a SQL database.

So, no, we're not actually taking a rest - we're looking at what REST the acronym means from a practical perspective. But perhaps after reading this, if you're looking to connect to a RESTful API, you can give your mind a rest knowing you have a path forward.

I know the first time I ever heard the term, I had no idea what it meant or how to approach it. Maybe you've been told a certain data source has a REST API for accessing it, but you're not sure where to get started leveraging that API with your control system.

This post will provide a practical explanation of what REST is, how it can be useful to you and how you can take advantage of data provided by RESTful APIs or web services in your operations.

Access to various industrial data via RESTful web services is increasingly becoming necessary in this era of inter-connectivity and big data. From sources such as devices with self-hosted web services to relevant market data such as weather information and pricing for commodities and energy, there is a host of relevant data to be integrated from such RESTful web services.

In this video training blog post, we will cover step-by-step how to easily connect to and consume data from RESTful web services and then push that data to OPC and SQL systems with the OPC Router.