Grafana - FT Historian

HI,

I was wondering if anyone has been able to use Grafana to connect to the Rockwell Ft Historian database before. I am really looking for some help if you have had success

Why would you want that?

Really just curious since Grafana isn't as powerful as the Historian is for trending. It's insanely powerful for the price, that I admit, but if you want to zoom in and out and do stuff ad-hoc it's somewhat painful in comparison.

If you are not already married to Grafana, then Thingworx would be a better dashboard tool to use with FT Historian, as it's a Rockwell product, and the integration is already done.

Thanks guys.
Only reason I am using Grafana is that it was a good free trend tool. I have FT Historian only so no FTView. Which would mean if I wanted to not have to buy any more licences I would have to use Vantage Point or Something else.

TWa said:

Thanks guys.
Only reason I am using Grafana is that it was a good free trend tool. I have FT Historian only so no FTView. Which would mean if I wanted to not have to buy any more licences I would have to use Vantage Point or Something else.

Click to expand...

Ahhh, this makes perfect sense. I forgot about VantagePoint to actually serve the data and indeed it was a better visualization tool.

Here's a tip, FT Historian is OSI PI under the hood. Searching the interwebs netted me this:

https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/gridprotectionalliance-osisoftpi-datasource/

Have a go and see if you can get it to work.

I've played around with Grafana and FactoryTalk Historian SE (Rockwells repackaged OSIsoft PI) for testing myself, and I've also been using someone elses install of Grafana talking to OSIsoft PI.

Grafana has the OSIsoft-PI data source plugin. (Search for osisoft in the Grafana Configuration\Plugin area)

That will need PI-WebAPI installed and configured to access the historian.
(Install kit is in the Redist\Advanced Server Options\PiWebAPI folder on the historian disk on 7/8)

When I played with it myself, it was a quick and dirty install, PI-WebAPI on an alternate port to avoid conflicts and I just used basic authentication.

Seemed to work pretty well on my test install, but I didn't read enough to make it production grade/secure, I only have end user access to a proper install.

I've done a project where I needed connect Grafana to the Siemens WinCC Taglogging database. I've used the JSON Plugin in Grafana (https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/simpod-json-datasource) and written a small Python application which implemented the Webserver, and delivered the WinCC archive data on request back to Grafana.