Overview of the OSI PI Collector

The Historian OSI PI Collector gathers data samples from an OSI PI data server and stores the corresponding data entries in the Historian Server or a cloud destination. Data can be gathered directly from the OSI PI Data Archive v3.2 or greater via the OSI PI AOSI PI v 1.3.4 or greater. This collector supports a distributed model, where the PI Data Server, the Collector, and Proficy Historian are installed on different machines.

The OSI PI Collector must be installed on the same computer as the OSI PI Data Archive. The OSI PI collector uses unsolicited collection, whereby changes to the OSI PI archives are detected, and are forwarded to the Historian server. The collector is intended to duplicate raw samples from the OSI PI Data Archive in an Historian data archive. You can specifically request the collector to transfer values from the OSI PI snapshot cache (as seen in the previous version of OSI PI Collectors), however, it is recommended to transfer the values directly from the PI archives to the Historian archives.

One OSI PI collector can collect data from a single OSI PI data archiver. To collect from multiple OSI PI data archives to an Historian archive, you must configure multiple OSI PI collectors.

Features

The following table outlines the OSI PI Collector features:


Feature	Capability
Browse Source For Tags	Yes*
Browse Source For Tag Attributes	Yes
Polled Collection	No
Minimum Poll Interval	N/A
Unsolicited Collection	Yes
Time Stamp Resolution	milliseconds or seconds
Accept Device Time stamps	Yes
Floating Point Data	Yes
Integer Data	Yes
String Data	Yes
Enumeration Data	Yes
Binary Data	No
Array Data	No
Enumeration Sets	Yes**
Collector Status Outputs	Yes
Python Expression Tags	Yes

Note: - *Tag browsing performance with OSI PI has been confirmed as satisfactory up to 130,000 tags. Beyond that threshold, OSI PI may take a long time to return the large number of tags. In such a case, it is recommended that the tags be exported from PI to an Excel work sheet and then uploaded to Historian.

**- The OSI PI Collector can also be used to automatically handle updates of digital states in Historian as enumerated sets without restarting the PI Collector. Consult the topic on Configuring Auto-synchronization of Digital States for details.

**- If digital states are renamed or deleted in the PI Collector, the corresponding enumerated sets in Historian are not automatically renamed or deleted without a restart of the PI collector. Unused enumerated sets cannot be automatically deleted, because the PI server does not notify the PI collector about rename or delete activity. However, the situation can be reconciled with certain manual steps. Consult the topics Renaming Digital States and Deleting Digital States for details.

**- In some instances, OSI PI Digital tags which are created as enumerated tags in Historian can contain values from the PI System digital set, rather than their assigned digital set. In these instances the System digital values will be reflected as 0 with BAD quality in Historian.