How to connect Ignition to existing IIOT environments?

Ignition
1

Dear all,
My company is manufacturing machines for worldwide sales; and we already mastered to get all the data for all of our machines in a central Cloud based IIOT environment in realtime.
Customers of us are using Ignition to monitor all of the equipment that gets used in their plants (also from other manufacturers than us) and they are demanding to get the machines data into Ingnition. The most obvious approach for us would be to establish some connection between our Cloud and the customers Ignition installation. This could get used to push the data from our IIOT environment into the customers Ignition instance at realtime.
Are there any opinions on this archiecture approach? What about the preferred Ignition archtecture pattern to master a connection to an existing cloud? Which components of Ignition would be required to make this happen?

Thanks in advance for any hint, kind regards. Matthias.

2

Possibilities in approximate order of increasing difficulty but also increasing customer convenience:

  • Expose your data via a conventional JSON or XML web api. Your customers will have to script access from the Ignition side, but there are many examples on this forum for similar tasks.

  • Implement MQTT with the Sparkplug payload specification. Allow your customers to configure their cloud data to push to their own MQTT broker. Then your customer can use Cirrus Link’s MQTT modules to subscribe to that data in Ignition.

  • Implement an OPC/UA interface to your cloud data. Allow your customers to configure security for OPC connections to their data.

  • Create an Ignition plug-in module that implements your IIOT access protocol, similar to what CL does for MQTT.

All of these will require careful security considerations.

If you are using MQTT already, there’s one more possibility:

  • Implement the Sparkplug specification in your field devices and allow your customers to push data directly to their own MQTT broker. You would be out of the middle, unless some customers don’t want to implement their own broker.
3

Thanks, Phill, appreciated.

After reading at a glance, bullet #2 seems to be the most interesting one because this would allow to push the datapoints from our cloud to the customers Ignition instance (while bullet #1 would mean the customer needs to poll, wouldn’t it?). Am I right that Cirrus Link is that embedded to Ignition that the customers Ignition project team would be able to access the data without additional efforts? Sorry for asking, but I’ve no Ignition experiences yet.

Hava a nice Sunday, regards. Matthias

4

Yes, a web API would have to poll. The MQTT and OPC solutions are subscription-based protocols that report by exception/change.

Cirrus Link is a 3rd-party partner of Inductive. So your customer would have to add the CL module to their Ignition install.