Good experiences with historian?

A number of our customers have been asking for historians recently. We normally use Citect or Wonderware for HMI and let that software take care of the data logging for trending purposes, but only keep 18 months data on the HMI platform.

I've never seen or used a historian. I imagine the historian doesn't have to come from the same vendor as the HMI, as the historian I think will retrieve the same data as the HMI via OPC or direct from the PLC. The Historian doesn't query the HMI datastore for the data. If communications are lost between the historian and the control system then no data is logged? Eg reboot the historian server and it doesn't have any records for the last 4 minutes?


Has anyone used or set up any historians which they would recommend? IEC 61850 would be a plus.

FYI we are looking at possibly 64 analog values to trend and another 500 trips/alarms/events that I imagine would be part of the history too.

For this small amount of data (albeit for very long time) I imagine today's 8-core 8GB ram servers would have no problem handing the load.

What happens when you need to replace the historian server hardware every 5 years?

Do customer IT departments handle the supply and care and feeding for the server or are control system suppliers also taking care of the IT side of Historians?

The historian seems to be a different animal than a control system with sensors, actuators, PLC and HMI.

Thanks for your thoughts

great points.

I don't trust any kind of computer or server past about 5 years which is why I think the process of replacing the server hardware has to be considered. I suppose if there are good backups the installation should be easily copied to another server.

V0N_hydro said:

great points.

I don't trust any kind of computer or server past about 5 years which is why I think the process of replacing the server hardware has to be considered. I suppose if there are good backups the installation should be easily copied to another server.

Click to expand...

Even doing so, you can do what we've started doing here to avoid that 'newer hardware change-out-nightmare' which is to create the HMI/DAQ/Custom Software package in a stable environment on a Virtual Machine, and then just use VMPlayer to run the VM on any hardware/OS that comes along.

Data (reports, trending, historian) is always pumped off to a centralized SQL Server, but we have no worries of that technology going obsolete in the near future, and the SQL Server can migrate to any hardware as it doesn't care about video, or sound, or drivers, etc. Then again, we do have many of our central server software virtualized as well.

As for collecting the data, if you intend to display it historically inside of your HMI clients, then generally you need to stick with the HMI Vendors 'Custom' approach.

If you just want to collect the data, and review it off line directly, or in Excel, or anything else, you can use just about any transaction server that can handle OPC on one end, and a database on the other end. Preferably one with triggers and such. There are a bunch out there...
http://www.maxxdownload.com/uforte_opc_historian.html
http://www.opcti.com/data-logging-opc-datahub.aspx

Some products also have built in trend viewers and web-based viewers, such as:
http://www.softwaretoolbox.com/cogentdatahub/html/datahubhistorian.html

http://www.inductiveautomation.com/products/legacy/factorysql


Prices vary wildly, but probably the grand-daddy of them all (and by FAR the most expensive ever made) would be Rockwell's Factory Talk Transaction Manager, coupled with their Historion.
http://www.rockwellautomation.com/rockwellsoftware/data/transmgr/orderinginfo.html

That list is obviously not complete, but should be a starting point to examine.

I've been using windows VMs on top of the linux scada servers for running of PLC and other device programming software as required without having to have a dedicated windows virus-nest around.

It hadn't occurred to me to use one for the HMI/scada as well, but that is a great idea I will definitely consider in the future!


I think I will have the historian be as separate from the control system as possible, and data will be pumped out to it and then the parties responsible for it can do as they please with the data and the display clients for it. a SQL server is more the IT department domain than control panel.

thanks for the links, I'll report back on my decisions.

MatrikonOPC has a historian for unlimited number of tags .... it's called OPC Desktop Historian

I have used the GE Historian which is part of Cimplicity. It can be expensive and frustrating at times but the latest versions of Historian seems to work well. It takes care of archieving data for you.

we normally use mango (open source web based HMI), citect or wonderware depending on the application so are most likely to use a citect or wonderware historian.

One of our customers asked us to look into osisoft and aspen historians. Everybody seems to want a historian!

For enterprise level process historian, OSI Pi is the industry standard.

SQL based historian like Inductive Automation isn't suited for longer term historian because the space it requires.

Rockwell Automation FTHitorian SE is a version of OSI PI historian. A very good program.