We have a customer that is looking to maybe move from Wonderware InTouch (not System Platform) to Ignition and has many years of data and some detailed reports built using the Wonderware Historian Client tools Excel plugin. How difficult would it be to convert the existing Excel based reports, it seems like you would need a third party tool? Is there an easy way to move the existing historical data from the Wonderware Historian into Ignition?
Any information on issues with this kind of conversion would be helpful. We would like to make the customer fully aware of any known issues or features they may lose by moving to Ignition.
Possible issues mostly seem to be Historian, reports and trends related. Anything else?
Historian speed and compression?
Reports, no Excel plugin. They use this for detailed reports and they are shared with other groups in the company that then use the SCADA supplied data in their own Excel reports.
The WW Historian and Clients trend and query apps are nice and it seems like most of the other SCADA packages are lacking trends wise. I’ve seen some older threads but is this still an issue with Ignition? Notes and alarms on trends and so on?
Long story short. It is going to be difficult to move Wonderware Historian data into Ignition. It is not impossible however because I am in the middle of doing that right now. Basically what you have to do is query the data out of the historian using the realtime SQL extensions and then manipulate that data into the SQL structure that Ignition uses to store it.
Without knowing more about your report structure, all I can say is that either you will want to look into using transaction groups so that you can query that data from Excel, or you are going to end up using the Ignition Reporting module. The reporting module is difficult to use in my opinion but once you have a report structure established it is nice having it native in the project itself. There is no tool to do this conversion, it will have to be done manually.
If you are talking about Ignition's historian I think the speed depends on the hardware of the computer used to host the SQL server. If it is good hardware than you should have no issues. Make sure to get a lot of storage because there is no compression. At least not in the sense of the compression used by a proprietary package like the Wonderware historian.
Wonderware Historian pre-2017 and the vast majority of SCADA software trending is hot garbage. The best trend client in the SCADA industry is VTScada, but Ignition’s is certainly better than Wonderware.
All of what you’ve described is possible, and all of it ranges from challenging to excruciatingly difficult. Generally in SCADA conversion projects some disruption to the end-user workflow (or, some “sacrifices”) has to be made.
It completely depends on the complexity of the reports, tag structures, etc., and the amount and format of the existing data. There’s no way to even guess at how much work it is without understanding both the existing Wonderware system and how it will look when it is migrated.
I start to see tools that will convert 3rd party Scada's into Ignition. I still have to experience the procedures, but it is possible.
It is also possible to migrate data from the WW Historian but you also need to know about the tags that will possibly change from a 3rd party to Ignition. There is a good change that the naming convention is different.
Renaming the tags in the new historian would be the challenging task.