Logging more than a single data point with historian

Is there a way to setup the tag historian to store additional qualifying information rather than just a single data point per line? At the moment you get tag name (ID), a value and a timestamp. It would make tracking the data a lot easier if I could, for example, store an equipment ID and batch ID into additional columns.

I was thinking that to do that I might need to setup a new table and either script the db queries or use transaction groups. I’m sure that would work but it kind of defeats the benefit of having the built in historian.

Is the built in historian really geared more to tracking and later displaying the values of a few key sensors rather than to document, store and track all of the components of a multi-step process? Is there a better (more complete) historical tracking solution available in one of the add-on modules that I’m not familiar with?

It may not be exactly what you are looking for, but in our case we generate reports based on the historian data, in our case to get the machine-id we we have defined a tag folder structure that help us to get the MachineName from the tagpath, with the machine name we can get more info about the machine by querying the assets table.

As for BatchNumber we have the WorkOrderidea and PartNumbers, we have some logic to based on the changes determine what was produced for each WorkOrder and PartNumbers.

I think you are looking to use a Transaction Group. Assuming you’re only interested in a subset of the data to track, you’ll be using less storage space to only trigger tracking as values/batches change.

There is not a perfect one-size-fits-everyone solution in Ignition, but it was designed this way to be customizable. Store your data in a SQL table as it changes with a Transaction Group and then use a SQL query to view.