Overview of the Collector Toolkit

Using the collector toolkit, you can write programs that integrate with Historian for Linux and leverage the same configuration tools, redundancy schemes, and health monitoring as collectors that are provided with Historian for Linux. A custom collector is a collector developed using the collector toolkit. It collects data and messages from a data source and writes them to a data archiver. Using the collector toolkit, you can create custom collectors that:

• Collect data and messages from any data source
• Perform collector compression and buffer collected data
• Report data and messages to a local or remote data archiver

Custom collectors can be developed to function much like the standard OPC and iFIX collectors that come with Historian for Linux. The collected data can be used in any application that connects to Historian for Linux.

The toolkit enables development of programs that collect data at the current time. It is not suitable for developing migration programs, file import programs, SQL import programs or other programs that produce data which has timestamps in the past. Use other Historian for Linux toolkits to accomplish these tasks.

The toolkit supports pre-processing raw data with Python Expression Tags during collection, provided that you enable this.