Historian Question

Does anyone know if we are getting FT View Enterprise SE and looking to get Historian would we have to get FactoryTalk Historian Site Edition and FactoryTalk VantagePoint if we want the business side able to look at trends or does FactoryTalk Historian Site Edition allow that or come with VantagePoint. Or is there any other Historian programs that work well with Rockwell that operator side and business side can both use? Thank you.

VantagePoint comes with Historian and can certainly generate reports and dashboards for the business side. FTV by itself isn't really all that good at putting reports together. I've had a lot of experience with VantagePoint and it does a good job. It is much easier to use today than it used to be. It was easy to create template reports that allowed the users (operator or business) to customize the information.

I imagine others here will have some good suggestions for alternatives to Historian and VantagePoint that can work with or independent of the FT View system.

OG

So when I look at the FactoryTalk Historian Site Edition package is says FactoryTalk VantagePoint EMI in not included. Is there a normal VantagePoint. Maybe is has changed since you looked last and it is separate packages now?

The FTV Historian is a custom version of OSI-PI historian. So all the PI tools work with it. Rockwell sells FactoryTalk Historian DataLink (an OSI-PI product) which is an addon for Excel. This allows engineers the ability to extract data from the historian and then use Excel to analyze, graph, etc.... I'm not sure what the cost per seat is anymore. But you can ask. I think (don't quote me) the historian/advantage package might come with one license.

Ken Moore said:

The FTV Historian is a custom version of OSI-PI historian. So all the PI tools work with it. Rockwell sells FactoryTalk Historian DataLink (an OSI-PI product) which is an addon for Excel. This allows engineers the ability to extract data from the historian and then use Excel to analyze, graph, etc.... I'm not sure what the cost per seat is anymore. But you can ask. I think (don't quote me) the historian/advantage package might come with one license.

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Not sure if Rockwell sells it, but the PI builder add on for Excel is worth its cost.

FactoryTalk VantagePoint (FTVP) and FactoryTalk Historian SE (FTHSE) used to be two separately sold packages. Some years back Rockwell included FTVP into FTHSE with one "Named User" license. This was handy as those two products really did go hand in hand.

Perhaps they have gone back to not including FTVP, which would be a shame. FTVP is much more than just Excel reports, though it does that too.

FTVP includes a web server so all the reports can be served up as standard web pages with all of the content viewable in a browser. That includes trends and Excel reports. Anyone on the business or production side can have access to those reports.

The catch there is with licenses. They give you one "Named User" license. That license is generally used by whoever is administering the system. You need floating licenses for your users. I think they were called "concurrent". So, if you have five of those licenses, any five people could be accessing reports at one time. Those licenses are freed up as people come and go. With the named license, it gets assigned to a specific user. That user always has a license. Your CEO, or Plant Manager would get a named license so they would always have access.

Ok, I just realized it sounds like I'm selling it now so I will stop. I really liked it and if you are in the Rockwell ecosystem with FTVSE, then Historian and VantagePoint made a lot of sense. And yes, Historian is built upon OSI PI and they have the PI Builder tool cardosocea mentioned above.

OG

VantagePoint doesn't seem to be 'well' supported anymore as it doesn't have an official support for newer server OS' yet or any new features that i've seen. That said, We use it on site and it does a lot of things quite well.

Last conversation I had w/ RA, they were pushing us towards Thingworx for that purpose.

That's too bad. I haven't seen any applications using ThingWorx yet.

I see VantagePoint supports Server 2016 but not 2019 yet. That is pretty typical for Rockwell and VantagePoint. The Server side of things is usually fairly slow to support new operating systems while the client side usually supports new O/S pretty quickly.

When Rockwell first purchased VantagePoint they maintained much of the staff from the original company. They supported the latest and greatest Windows versions. They came out with updates almost monthly. Of course, that all changed as they were assimilated into Rockwell.

Shame to let it wither. At least they took the trending tool from VP and incorporated it into FTVSE. That was a huge improvement.

OG

Yeah, the issue is that mainstream support for 2016 ends next year.
So I really can't justify installing software that doesn't support 2019 as a migration path at least.
I brought it up w/ our regional acct mgr and they indicated it should get some kind of revision to support it, but well, still waiting

I don't know why RA don't just license OSI's client instead of rolling their own client (Vantage Point).

Btw. OSI's Processbook will be sunset soon. Stop of sale at end of this year as they are encourging everyone to move to PI Vision (web based).

harryting said:

I don't know why RA don't just license OSI's client instead of rolling their own client (Vantage Point).

Btw. OSI's Processbook will be sunset soon. Stop of sale at end of this year as they are encourging everyone to move to PI Vision (web based).

Click to expand...

Also, AVEVA bought OSI and AVEVA owns ArchestrA/WonderWare. So, who knows what the future of OSI is going to be.

Ignition is good but its still "new".

I like VantagePoint and use it a lot. The SQL Add in is very handy for using other data sources. I have been able to get good support, just not after hours.



Only problem with is AVEVA is that they have ruined stand alone InTouch. The licensing is a nightmare and it used to be to copy your project was one nice folder with a few files in it. Now it has multiple folder with over 65000 files! And it decides to create all these bitmaps of each of your screens even if your not using the web browser part. More unneeded junk you have to clean up.



Don't even get me started on their System Platform and Galaxy nonsense. Not when the first thing you have to get is the Galaxy Scrubber tool to clean up a PC after it corrupts itself.

hi, I can't find the website of the VantagePoint... does it exist?