Configuring Redundant Collectors and Groups

Important information to know about the failover of Redundant Collectors:

  • In the Redundancy section of the Collectors page, you can use the Make Active Collector Now! button to manually force a failover to a backup collector.

  • In an Enterprise system, collector redundancy failover happens only after 5 minutes after a tag change. You must select the Make Active Collector Now! button after the first 5 minutes for the failover to happen.

    Also, when you shut down an active collector, it does failover. However, if there was a tag change then shutting down the active collector does not cause failover immediately, it is just delayed by 5 minutes. There will not be any data loss since the backup collector sends data for the past 15 minutes when it becomes active.

  • Failover precedent is cyclical - the last collector in a redundant group will automatically failover to the first collector in the group.
  • Configuration Manager service must be running for failover to happen in mirroring environment, If the Configuration Manager service is down, the failover will not happen.

Procedure

  1. To configure redundant collectors:
    1. In Historian Administrator, on the Collectors page, select the collector that will be the first collector in your redundant group.
    2. In the Redundancy section in the Settings section, select the Redundant Collector Enabled option and select Update.
    3. On the Collectors page, select the collector that will be your second (or backup to the first) collector in your redundant group.
    4. In the Redundancy section, in the Settings section, select the Redundant Collector Enabled option.
    5. In the Backup For list, select the collector name that this collector will back up (In this case it would be the first collector in your redundant group) and then select Update.
      You will be prompted to confirm that tags configured for the backup collector will no longer be collected.
    6. Select Yes.
      Redundancy is now configured for these two collectors. In Admin UI, on the Main page, the Redundancy Status of the first collector will be Active and the backup collector, Standby.
  2. To add more collectors to the redundant group:
    1. On the Collectors page, select the collector that will be the last collector in your redundant group.
    2. In the Redundancy section, in the Settings section, select the Redundant Collector Enabled option
    3. In the Backup For list, select the collector that backs up the currently last collector in the group and then select Update.
    4. (optional) To have collectors in the redundant group failover when the active collector’s status goes to Unknown, select the Collector Status Enabled option in the Failover Triggers subsection of the Redundancy section, and select Update.
    5. (optional) To define a watchdog tag, browse to select the tag, select the desired condition from the Failover Triggers section, and then select Update.
      Make sure you are browsing and defining the watchdog tag in the principal (or first) collector in your redundant group.