we have a client that wants to use Ignition Edge as a local fallback. They also use canary as their historian. The main Ignition gateway has canary collectors set up. If the wastewater plant loses connection to the main plant and the main Ignition server, the Edge machine would be used to locally monitor and control the WW plant. That’s the easy part.
They also want the ability to store and forward data from the edge machine to the main Ignition gateway once the connection is restored. Is this possible even though they’re using Canary as the historian?
I would think the Canary Collectors would be at the edge - then it would naturally store and forward using the Canary S&F - Though I don't remember the rules with Ignition Edge and 3rd party modules to have the Canary Module at the edge.
If this is possible this would save us a lot of headache. I did try and add the Canary module to a test Ignition Edge instance I made. I see this error, but I'm not sure what license is it talking about. Is it referring to the Ignition Edge license or the Canary module license?
Canary module is free - I vaguely remember issues with Edge and 3rd party modules. This is typically why we just put a limited version of the full platform - too limited for our needs at the edge.
The only way around it I see is to use the OPC-UA collector from Canary at the edge - you just don't get the full experience of using the module, but if you don't need the provider to view trends or data this would work.
It doesn't seem like there's an easy way to do this with Edge. We've opted to go with a standard version of Ignition where we would have had Edge. That way we can have the Canary module closer to the data source and can inherently store and forward.
I’m late to this discussion, but interested to understand why Edge was not successful in your testing. Edge is built to S&F up to 10M rows or roughly 1 month of data to a Historian configured on a Full gateway. This “S&F” is done through Edge Sync Services. Was there a limitation of the Canary Historian that did not permit this?
After some extensive conversations with Ignition support, I found that Edge only supports store and forward with standard SQL databases. Like DSI600 mentioned, Edge cannot have the Canary module installed on it. Therefore, it will NOT be able to do store and forward unfortunately. For our use case, we've decided to just install another instance of Ignition. The canary module inherently does store and forward for you.
Pretty sure this works fine and you might just be misunderstanding it. You don't want or need the Canary module on the edge.
The edge runs its internal historian which has its own store and forward and then passes data through the gateway network. The central Ignition server runs the Canary Ignition collector module and the Canary store and forward service. Canary supports backfilling (though with some size limitations) so it will fill the gaps once connection is reestablished.
If you have a working instance of this, please provide more detail. I think the biggest issue is that Canary is not a built-in historian provider which is what Edge is looking for. Canary uses "collectors" that the Edge cannot natively see. I think this is the main disconnect between Edge and Canary.
I don't have an actual Canary historian available to fully test it end to end but I was able to configure it between the two Ignition servers just fine.
CentralServer (8.3.8):
Installed Canary Module 26.0.0
Services Historian - Create new Canary Historian and named it testCanary
EdgeServer (8.3.8)
Ignition Edge Sync Settings
Remote Gateway name: CentralServer
Remote History Provider name: testCanary
Remote History Sync Enabled
In the edge logs I get:
RemoteHistorianSink - 01Sep2026 12:04:38
Remote sink service state changed to 'Available'
LegacyHistorianSyncable - 01Sep2026 12:04:38
Historian syncable 'edgeHistorian' is starting. Will synchronize data to remote historian 'testCanary' on server 'CentralServer'.
I can't test it any further but perhaps try that and see if it works.
I was skeptical, so I recently started downloading the Canary module myself to run through this same test. Thanks for posting your findings!
Within tag configuration on the Edge, you will always select the local Edge Historian for every tag's History Provider. The rest is configured in Edge Sync within the gateway configuration page. The Edge gateway should require only the name of the History Provider, as configured on the remote gateway. Edge should have no requirement for the database architecture / drivers on the other end of the Remote Historian. So, if Canary presents itself as a Storage Provider to the Ignition gateway (from what I've read, and from @Nol's post above, it appears that it does), then Edge Sync should be able to sync ALL of its internal history to that remote provider. You should even be able to select a History Splitter to sync the data to, where data goes to both a MSSQL & Canary Historian simultaneously...
In my experience, Edge --> Full History sync has been a saving grace. It's not limited by the same constraints as a Full --> Full gateway's Store & Forward engines (~50k records, etc.). We've seen several days of high-frequency data appear after an extended outage without any known misses.
One limitation with this architecture is that you MUST select a SINGLE History Provider to store ALL data to. This might be a concern (or extra work required) if you intend to store some tag histories for 1-month, other tag histories for 1-year, etc...
Another limitation is that Edge is incapable of querying those remote databases directly. If you require displaying history older than Edge holds, or custom table data, you'll need to send messages to/from central gateway. Or - continue your current path - and utilize a full Ignition installation w/ external sync solution.
You say you created a new Canary Historian. I'm unclear on what that means exactly. Canary uses a Collector to send data to the Canary historian. Canary does not use a typical historian provider as you mentioned above. Please provide more detail on what you mean by "Create new Canary Historian and named it testCanary."
The Store & Forward service is responsible for transporting data to the Canary Historian server and buffering data in the event the connection between the two is broken.
That Ignition "Store & Forward service" (Storage Provider) is what Edge targets.
Services -> Historian - Create new Canary Historian and named it testCanary
When you have the Canary module installed you can go under your historians and hit create and the option to create a Canary Historian is available in that menu.
Yes Canary uses collectors/providers and has its own module but it also adds the ability to create a Canary Historian in the centralIgnition server.
This is step 4 of their guide, have you followed it?
Select Create a new Collector. Canary Collectors are responsible for logging data to the Canary Historian. Here you can configure Ignition to send data to Canary as a tag Storage Provider by completing the following fields.
In general, if you can select a Storage Provider within the Tag Editor in Designer, then Edge should be able to target it as well.
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