Data from remote facility

Ignition
1

Attempting to reliably integrate data from remote facility with intermittent connectivity…

A. I have two licensed instances of Ignition running as Historians, both logging OPC tags of PLC process data. Each to their own respective local MySQL database servers. One at a main facility (the Works with Vision) and one at a geographically remote facility (without the vision module) connected by a private VPN and residing in different subnets. There are times with poor connectivity between the facilities, outages may last up to a day and a half.

B. With phpMyAdmin I created a new database user with all rights on the remote MySQL instance that is connected to the remote instance of Ignition and allows connections from the IP address of the main facility MySQL and Ignition instance. (probably needs some less rights, but have started with all, limited only by IP address for now)

C. I have commented out the MySQL localhost only binding on the remote server

D. Connected the main facility instance of Ignition successfully to the remote MySQL database instance

E. I set up a new historical transaction group to Execute (thinking to try to read the remote MySQL database history tags) once per minute with the data source being the remote MySQL database connection. (the default use normally being to connect OPC-UA tags to MySQL database tags)

F. I unchecked ‘Automatically create table’. I also changed the OPC data mode to ‘Read,’ should I ‘Bypass the Store and Forward system’ and/or change any other options as well ??

G. What do I have to do next, to collect the tags from the remote MySQL database Historian to be placed in a Vision window at the main facility? Write a script of some kind or another? I suppose that I need to manually create local copies of the remote MySQL tags with different names?

H. Have I used the available metaphors correctly here? … or done something lame, as in tried to connect a water hose directly to a light socket without a hydroelectric generator in between them …or am I on the right track here?

I. I have not been able to find anything about a configuration like this. Should I have been trying to connect OPC connections instead of MySQL connections perhaps? Looking at
Post subject: Re: Combining data from several servers viewtopic.php?f=23&t=3427&p=5615
it would seem so. Perhaps I have begun reinventing the store and forward model needlessly?

J. I can see some of my remote tag values by browsing the table of the month, but can see that this not an out of the box configuration and is probably going to need some kind of scripting.

Thanks!

2

Hi,

Yes, if I understand what you want to do correctly (which is, in essence, query the historical tag data on the remote machine from the central one), you’re thinking about it in the wrong way.

All you need to do is create a database connection on the main machine that points to the database on the remote machine. It sounds like this is what you’ve done in step C that you outlined.

Once you can make a connection to that machine, you should be able to query tags there. To see this, go to an easy chart or table on a vision window. On the easy chart, go to the pen configuration (right click, go to customizer). Select the “browse for tags” button (in a table, edit the binding for the data, and select “tag history”).

In both cases, you should now see the tags from the remote machine. They will be listed as “[databaseName/systemName]Path/To/Tag”. In other words, you will see the name of the database connection that you added, and you’ll see the “name” of the remote ignition machine. (Each gateway has a name, set under “gateway settings”, and set by default on install)

Hope this helps, let me know if something isn’t clear!

Regards,

3

Hi Clegg,

No, I didn’t want to try to browse the remote database or OPC tags directly over our slow and unreliable remote connection. The limited bandwidth being why I had purchased this exact configuration. After calls with four very patient folks from IA tech support; I installed the Tag History Splitter on the remote instance of Ignition SQL Bridge and got OPC tag data sent from the remote location filling both the remote database and the local database for quick local browsing at our main location. Then Greg was finally able to get the database driving provider, that I had been trying to get working, sending tag configuration data from the remote to the main Ignition instances. Then all was well and the rest is gravy from there. Thanks!