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.
Streamlining Historical Data for Better Decisions
Accessing and making sense of historical data is essential for informed decision-making in industrial automation—but without the right tools, it can be time-consuming and frustrating. TOP Server’s Local Historian Plug-In combined with Dream Report turns this challenge into a streamlined process. With just a few simple steps, users can quickly retrieve, analyze, and visualize historical data in clear, dynamic reports.
What Is Dream Report? A Powerful Reporting Tool
Dream Report is a convenient, real-time report generator and dashboard solution that is quickly and easily configurable for the collection, archiving, and analysis of data and alarms. The intuitive and easy-to-use interface enables fast project development with low engineering costs.
Dream Report has drivers to collect data and alarms from multiple proprietary historians, as well as OPC DA, OPC A&E, ODBC, OPC HDA drivers, and more for easy connectivity to automation systems and equipment.
With the press of a button, you can build a web page with live data that allows you to dynamically generate new reports. Reports can also be printed straight to a printer and saved as PDFs.
Why Easy Historical Data Reporting Matters
In industrial environments, historical data holds the key to understanding performance, identifying issues, and making strategic improvements. Yet too often, that data is locked away in hard-to-access systems or requires specialized skills to retrieve and analyze. By simplifying the process with tools like TOP Server’s Local Historian Plug-In and Dream Report, organizations can turn raw data into actionable insights—faster and with less effort. This means less time wrestling with spreadsheets and more time focusing on optimization, compliance, and smarter decision-making. In a world where every second counts, making historical data easy to access and understand is a competitive advantage you can’t afford to overlook.
Quick Tutorial: Getting Your Historical Data into Dream Report
In this video, you’ll learn how to quickly retrieve OPC HDA data from TOP Server’s Local Historian plug-in and generate a report in Dream Report in just 8 minutes. Please note that while this use case utilizes TOP Server as the OPC HDA data source, this same process could apply to any OPC HDA enabled data source.
The goal of this tutorial is to create a report as a proof-of-concept to showcase the possibilities of effectively displaying historical data for analysis. This tutorial is designed to show you how you can leverage these tools to access and report on historical data without a complicated setup.
Wrap-Up & Next Steps: Getting Started with Dream Report
In the video, we demonstrated the following:
- Set up TOP Server to expose data over OPC HDA using the Local Historian Plug-In
- Created a new Dream Report project
- Added a Data Source
- Created a new Report
- Configured an Automatic Statistical Table (AST)
- Configured a Chart to display the moving average
- Exported the report as a PDF
- Displayed the report in the Web Portal
By leveraging Dream Report’s intuitive reporting tools, you can quickly build automated reports and dashboards using data from a wide range of data sources. This streamlined approach supports Industry 4.0 goals by improving data visibility, reducing engineering time, and enabling smarter operational decisions.
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