Ignition as a Site Historian vs. Others (Canary, OSI PI, AWS)

For a Site Historian requirement, I am exploring the historians available in the market and understanding where each Historian fits well. Can anyone throw light on the following questions?

  1. Ignition vs. Canary
    Q: Under what circumstances would an Ignition customer choose Canary as the target historian or embed Canary’s charts/applications into Ignition Designer?. I see that Ignition has its Historian, asset modeling through partner modules, and two visualization systems.
    Q: Does Ignition also directly compete with Canary?

  2. Ignition vs. OSI PI
    Q: Are there any significant advantages in choosing Ignition over OSI PI? (OSI PI has 400+ interfaces, Historian, asset framework, and visualization)

  3. Ignition vs. AWS
    Q: With Greengrass, Timestream, and SiteWise, AWS offers robust connectivity, Historian, asset modeling, and visualization. With AWS Outposts, they can also be a Site Historian (apart from being a Cloud Historian). What are the use-cases where one would prefer Ignition over AWS, and what are the unique advantages?

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That is a question I would like to see answerred as well!

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IMO, using Ignition and OSI PI together is a pain if you want real time data alongside your historical data.

For realtime there are a few "out of the box" options, but none of them work great.

  1. OPC-DA COM Connection - Was working but would break frequently. Once we updated PI it stopped working altogether and would throw errors in Ignition.
  2. PI JDBC Database Connection - Works well enough, but not really feasible at scale

We ended up just rolling our own solution. I built a C# service that grabs all the tags from PI and publishes them to a MQTT broker, which is then consumed by Ignition. It works great in comparison to the other two options.

For Historical data using an OPC-HDA connection in Ignition works great with PI, we've been using it for years with no issues (other than the occasional restart of the PI HDA service).

Bump on this thread here.

Does anyone have any experience using Canary? We see some advantages to pushing data directly from your OPC/MQTT provider to a database, but I’m curious how good the ignition module is that allows the data to flow both ways?

How well would a product like this integrate with a large system (+1 million tags)

Trent

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I have integrated Canary on 6 installs with Ignition. I haven’t touched 1 millions tags the most has been 10K.

I love the integration and how well it works with Ignition. I have not ran into any issues. We typically do use the built in Ignition trending on windows in vision/perspective as it can be indirect that way with tag paths - using indirect trends with Axiom is a bit complicated since it has to be passed in the url. Our customers usually do purchase 1-2 axiom licenses though as it is a great trending tool. Some build their own “charts” and just have dual monitor with Axiom on one side and Ignition on the other.

Using the system.tag.queryTagHistory is easy as well getting data out of Canary.

For getting data into SSRS reports or anything outside of the canary/ignition module, it is somewhat a PIA as it has to use the ODBC connector using SQL openQuery - we just have built some stored procedures that will do this to make this process easier.

Recommended 100%

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