About Historian Data Collectors

The Historian Data Collectors General manual is intended for people who install, use, and maintain data collectors in an Historian archiving system. This manual provides descriptive material and specific operating procedures for performing all common tasks.

Many data collectors exist to bring data into the Historian Server, as listed in Supported Windows Versions for Historian Collectors.

Since installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting from a Historian perspective are essentially the same for all collectors other than the File Collector, this chapter summarizes the characteristics of each and highlights their differences. It also provides a detailed description for File Collector, since it differs from the other types of collectors.

A Data Collector gathers data from a data source on a schedule or event basis, processes it, and forwards it to the Historian Server for archiving. The following figure shows the data flow in a typical Historian system from a data source to the archive.

Data Collectors use a specific data acquisition interface matched to the data source type, such as iFIX EDA (Easy Data Access) or OPC 1.0 or 2.0 (Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control). For more information, see Supported Acquisition Interfaces. The Simulation Collector generates random numeric and string data. The File Collector reads data from text files.