System Components

A typical Historian system contains several components:

One or more Historian Data or Alarm Collectors to data sources
One or more Historian Servers for data or alarms
One or more Historian Administrators
One or more Historian Admin Consoles
Historian OLE DB provider
One or more Historian HDA Servers
One or more Historian Diagnostic Manager
One or more Historian Client Manager (Mirror systems only)
Historian Configuration Manager (Mirror systems only)
Historian Embedded PostgreSQL Database
Historian Embedded Tomcat Container
Historian Indexing Service
One or more Excel Add-In packages, installed on any client node
Programs using Historian User API
Programs using Historian Web REST API
Programs using Software Development Kit (SDK)
Programs using Java APIs

All clients communicate with the Server through the Historian API. This list describes the functions performed by each component:

Historian Alarms and Events

Historian Alarms and Events provides tools to collect, archive, and retrieve alarm and event data in Historian.

Refer to Historian Alarms and Events for more information.

Historian Data Collectors

Data Collectors gather data from a data source on a schedule or event basis, process it, and forward it to the Historian Server or a Web socket for archiving. The following collector functions are common across all types of collectors (except the File Collector):

Maintaining a local cache of tag information to sustain collection while the server connection is down.
Automatically discovering available tags from a data source and presenting them to the Historian Administrator.
Buffering data during loss of connection to the server and forwarding it to the server when the connection is restored.
Optionally, automatically adjusting timestamps for synchronizing collector and archiver timestamps.
Supporting both collector and device time stamping, where applicable.
Scheduling data polling for polled collection.
Performing a first level of data compression (collector compression).
Responding to control requests, such as requests to pause or resume collection.
Options to send data to Historian or Cloud service through a Web socket connection

For mission-critical data collection, redundant collectors are possible. Historian includes a mirroring option for high availability and load balancing, so the data is available for the organization all the time.

Refer to Historian Data Collectors for more information.

Historian File Collector

File Collectors import .CSV or .XML files into Historian. The files can contain data, alarms, tagnames, or other configuration information, and messages that you can import with a File Collector.

Refer to the Historian Data Collectors manual for more information.

Historian Administrator

A Historian Administrator provides a graphical user interface for performing Historian maintenance functions in a Windows environment including:

Tag addition, deletion, and configuration.
Maintaining and backing up archive files.
Data collector configuration.
Security configuration.
Searching and analyzing system alerts and messages.
A Calculation Collector with the ability to create a new tag based on calculations, and stores the result as time series data available with the Historian Administrator only.
Setting up your OPC HDA Server available with the Historian Administrator only.

Refer to the Using the Historian Administrator manual for more information.

Historian Web Admin Console

The Historian Web Admin now operates in a web-based environment. The Historian Web Admin Console provides an enhanced Dashboard that displays the health of the system in one convenient location. The Dashboard is available in the Web Admin Console only. You can view the following diagnostics details:

Data Node Diagnostics Displays the Historian servers connected to the system.
Collector Diagnostics Displays the details of the faulty collectors.
Client Diagnostics Displays the top five busiest clients connected to the system.

The Dashboard provides Interactive Configuration management, which helps you configure mirror nodes (available in the Web Admin Console only), Tags, Collectors, Data Stores and Archives. The functionality of the Calculation Collector and the ability to configure your OPC HDA Web server are not included in the Web Administrator.

The Historian Admin Console uses a client-access license (CAL).

Historian Server

Historian Server performs the following tasks:

Manages all system configuration information.
Manages system security, audit trails, and messaging.
Services write and read requests from distributed clients.
Performs final data compression.
Manages archive files.

Historian Diagnostics Manager

The Historian Diagnostics Manager monitors the health of the Historian system and executes a few rules on the nodes, collectors, and clients, and generates the appropriate fault record. The details of these faults are displayed in the Admin Console Dashboard.

The following are the faults and their severity level:


Fault Type	Fault Description	Fault Level
Collector Status Fault	Generated when the collector goes to the Unknown or Stopped state.	Error
Collector Overrun Fault	Generated when at least one overrun occurs on a collector in last 24 hours.	Warning
Collector OutOfOrder Fault	Generated when at least one OutOfOrder occurs on a collector in last 24 hours.	Information
Collector StoreForward Fault	Generated when the collector Last Data Sample Time Stamp is delayed by more than an hour.	Information
Collector ConnectDisconnect Fault	Generated when the collector is Disconnected and connected at least once in last 24 hours.	Information
Service DiskSpace Fault	Generated when a node disk space is about to reach its free space limit.	Warning
Client InActive Fault	Generated when a client is not active for the last one hour.	Information
Client BusyRead Fault	Generated when the client makes relatively more number of reads per minute.	Information
Client BusyWrite Fault	Generated when the client makes relatively more number of writes per minute.	Information
Client TimedOutRead Fault	Generated when the client makes a timed out read query.	Warning

Historian Client Manager

The Historian Client Manager acts as the client connection manager and message router for the system. The Client Manager will examine messages and forward them to the correct Data Archiver or to the Configuration Manager. This service is deployed only for mirrored systems.

Historian Configuration Manager

The Historian Configuration Manager maintains and distributes the entire System configuration. There can be multiple Historian nodes but only one Configuration Manager. This Configuration Manager node is used to store system configuration, such as tag names, collector names and Historian Node names. This service is deployed only for mirrored systems.

Historian Tomcat Container

An instance of Tomcat is used exclusively by Historian as an open source Java-based Web server to support the Historian Web Administrator and Trend tool. It supports SSL and the use of certificates for enhanced security.

UAA Tomcat Container

An instance of Tomcat is used exclusively by Historian as an open source Java-based Web server to support the External UAA.

Historian PostgreSQL Database

An instance of PostgreSQL is used exclusively by Historian to store tag names to improve searching for tags in the Trend tool and Web Admin Console.

UAA PostgreSQL Database

An instance of PostgreSQL is used exclusively by Historian to store UAA details.

Reverse Proxy Service

Provides secure connection by supporting https protocol.

Historian Indexing Service

This is an indexing service that periodically runs against the Historian tag database, creates a tag index, and stores information in the PostgreSQL database instance, a preferred method to allow for quick search results.

Excel Add-In

The Historian Excel Add-In is a very useful tool for presenting and analyzing data stored in archive files. Using this tool, you can design custom reports of selected data, automatically process the information, and analyze the results. You can also use it for performing tag maintenance functions in Historian, such as adding tags, importing or exporting tags, or editing tag parameters.

For more information, refer to Using the Historian Excel Add-In.

Excel Add-in for Operations Hub

The Historian Excel Add-in enables you to query historical data of objects and object types defined in Operations Hub. You should install Operations Hub to use this Excel Add-in.

Customers purchasing Historian Standard or Enterprise licenses now receive a no-cost license for the Operations Hub Server and Historian Analysis run-time application. This Operations Hub Server enables customers to define an asset model including tag mapping. The Historian Analysis application is a pre-built Operations Hub HTML5 application that enables users to do advanced trend analyses, including the ability to make annotations.

Excel Add-in for Operations Hub is tested with Excel 2016, 2019 versions (32 and 64 bit).

Historian OPC HDA Server

The Historian OPC HDA Server reads the raw data stored in Historian and sends it to the connected OPC HDA clients. The Historian OPC HDA Server is in compliance with OPC Server HDA 1.20 standards.

Refer to the Historian OPC HDA Server manual for more information.

Historian User API

The Historian User API is intended to provide high speed read/write access to Historian data and read access to Historian tags. There is no access to alarms, events, or messages.

Use the API to develop applications in C or C++, which read and write data to the Historian server when the Historian SDK and Historian OLEDB do not meet your project requirements for performance or programming language.

Historian allows you to develop both 32-bit and 64-bit User API programs.

Note: If you want to build a 32-bit User API program on a 64-bit operating system, then you need to rename the ihuapi32.lib to ihuapi.lib and include it in your program.

Refer to the ihUserApi Help system for more information.

Historian Web REST API

Historian includes a REST API to connect your Java Web Client with Historian data. Refer to the Historian REST API Reference Manual in the /Additional Documentation folder of your installation directory for more information.

Historian SDK

The Software Development Kit (SDK) is designed for writing Visual Basic (VB) or Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) Scripts. Using the SDK, you can develop your own scripts to perform selected repetitive or complex tasks or to make your own custom user interface. To use the SDK, create a VB/VBA project with the SDK as a project reference. Refer to the SDK Help system for more information.

Historian Client Access API

Most applications today rely on .NET based development platforms from Microsoft. To enable easier integration with Historian, a .NET API is provided. The Client Access API supports both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Operating Systems.

Java APIs

Most open source, quick development applications rely on JAVA as their programing language. To enable easier integration with Historian, JAVA APIs are provided. The JAVA APIs support 64-bit Windows Operating Systems.

Refer to the Historian Java API Reference Offline Manual in the /Additional Documentation folder of your installation directory for more information.

Collector Toolkit

The Collector Toolkit allows you to write programs that integrate tightly with Historian and leverage the same configuration tools, redundancy schemes, and health monitoring as collectors that ship with Historian. 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. Each deployment of a Collector developed on the Collector Toolkit consumes a CAL.

Historian Migration Tools

Historian provides migration tools to allow you to migrate your existing Classic Historian configurations and data and your iFIX Alarm and Event data into the Historian environment. Tags, collection rates, and dead bands for tags configured in Classic Historian can be transferred into Historian by the migration tools.

For more information, refer to Migrating Advanced and Classic Historian Data.