Sharing a free, open-source OPC UA toolkit that's useful alongside Ignition. Credit first, since it's a fork: the simulator half is built on Microsoft's open-source OPC PLC sample (GitHub - Azure-Samples/iot-edge-opc-plc: Sample OPC UA server with nodes that generate random and increasing data, anomalies and much more ... · GitHub) and the OPC Foundation's UA .NET stack. The simulation guts are their work. I refactored it, added a web client, and released the result under one roof, MIT licensed. Full disclosure, it's my own project, so consider this a shameless plug.
The simulator is an OPC UA server that behaves like real equipment: changing values, alarms and events you can acknowledge, methods, and your own tags defined in a JSON file. Point an Ignition OPC UA client connection at it and you can build and demo a gateway with realistic data before any hardware exists. If you define your actual tag structure in the JSON, your UDTs and tag paths are ready before commissioning. It also generates alarms on a cycle, which is handy for testing alarm pipelines.
The browser is the part I built from scratch: an independent OPC UA client that runs as a web app. When a device connection acts up, it's a second opinion for "is it the server or is it my gateway config?" Browse the address space, watch values live, write, call methods, check history. It also works pointed at Ignition's own OPC UA server if you want to see exactly what the gateway exposes to third parties. If you host it somewhere shared (it's one docker compose command), anyone on the network can open it in a browser, and you can send someone a link that opens directly on a specific tag.
Runs on Windows, Linux, Pi, or Docker. Downloads are single files with no runtime to install, and the docs start from zero OPC UA knowledge.
It's v1.0. If you connect it to an Ignition gateway and hit anything weird (security policy negotiation, session drops, browse quirks) I'd honestly love the bug report. That's the real-world testing I can't do alone.