Overview

About OT Connect

OT Connect allows you to connect to and synchronize Tag metadata from an OPC-compliant historian. This also allows you to enable Tag subscriptions to view, analyze, and act on real time process data, such as temperature or pressure.

With OT Connect services, you can do the following:
  • Set up a connection to a process historian to ingest Tag data, Tag Hierarchy, and query for Readings in the historian.
  • Define scheduling to ingest and synchronize Tag metadata.
  • Query historical Readings for Health Trends and Policy nodes.
  • Enable tag subscriptions which trigger Health Indicators and Policy workflows.

OT Connect System Requirements

License Requirements

The APM OT Connect license is required to take full advantage of the OT Connect functionality.

Note: If you are upgrading from a 4.x version which is running PDI to use OT Connect, you must also activate the OPC Interfaces licenses.

Additional Components Required

In addition to the basic APM system architecture, your system must also contain the following components:

  • OT Connect Conductor service must be installed on the APM Server.
  • OT Connect Process Data Server: A machine on which the OPC compliant software is installed. The software requirements of this server are determined by the third-party distributor of the software. OT Connect Adapter must be installed on the OT Connect Process Data Server.
  • Process Historian: A machine on which the process historian software is installed. The software requirements of this machine are determined by the third-party distributor of the software.
Important: OT Connect supports the OPC Foundation Historical Data Access (OPC-HDA) specification version 1.20. To support direct consumption of readings by Asset Health indicators and triggered policies, the server must implement the End aggregate or preferably use the OT Connect OPC DA Protocol Adapter for the Data Access data.

Refer to the supported software and devices documentation for information about OT Connect Process Data Servers and Process Historians that are tested for the OT Connect feature. The OT Connect Adapter can be installed and run on the OT Connect Process Data Server in OT Source Capability Utility mode to validate the capabilities of specific OT Connect Process Data Servers and process historians on a case-by-case basis. Refer to the deployment section for more information on the OT Connect Adapter.

System Architecture

The following image shows the basic system architecture for deploying OT Connect with one APM Server.

Deploying OT Connect

After you have installed and configured the basic APM system architecture, you must perform some configuration steps specifically for OT Connect.

If you want to use OT Connect with Asset Health Manager and Policy Designer, you must also configure the services associated with these modules.