Historian Installation Workflow

  1. Design your system architecture.

    Decide what collectors to instantiate on which nodes, which computers to designate as the Historian server and Historian Administrator, whether or not they will be web-based, and how much memory and disk space you can assign to buffers and archives. Record the computer names of each node.

  2. Ensure that data sources are installed.
  3. Set up your Historian environment.
  4. On the server node, launch the installer, select Install Historian, and follow the on-page instructions to install Historian on a single server on in a distributed environment.
  5. Activate your product license at http://digitalsupport.ge.com.
  6. Install the collectors.
  7. Restart your computer if prompted to do so.
  8. As needed, install Web-based Clients.
  9. For the Windows-based Historian Administrator clients, start the Administrator from Historian Startup Group.

    When the home page for Historian Administrator appears, you are ready to set up archives, collectors, and tags in the Data Store Maintenance, Collector Maintenance, and Tag Maintenance pages.

The following table provides a list of installation options available in Historian, along with purpose of installing each one.
Installation Option When to Install
Historian Server Installing the Historian server is mandatory to work with Historian. If you want to use Web-based Clients, you must provide the User Account and Authentication (UAA) server details while installing the Historian server.
When you install the Historian server, the following components are installed as well:
  • The RemoteCollectorConfigurator utility: A command-line tool, which allows you to manage collectors remotely.
  • The UAA Configuration tool: A utility that allows you to specify the UAA server details to match with the UAA server used by Web-based Clients.
Alarms and Events Install Alarms and Events if you want to retrieve and store alarms and events data from any OPC-compliant alarms and events server using the OPC Classic Alarms and Events collector.
Collectors Installing collectors is mandatory to collect and store data in Historian.

When you install collectors, all the collectors and the Remote Management Agents are installed. You must then create instances of each collector and manage them using Configuration Hub.

When you install collectors, if iFIX/CIMPLICITY are installed on the same machine, instances of the following collectors are created automatically:
  • The iFIX collector
  • The iFIX Alarms & Events collector
  • The OPC Classic Data Access collector for CIMPLICITY
  • The OPC Classic Alarms and Events collector for CIMPLICITY
Client Tools Install Client Tools if you want the following components:
  • Client Tools
  • Historian Administrator
  • OLE DB driver and samples
  • The OPC Classic HDA server
  • User API and SDK
  • Historian Client Access API
  • Collector Toolkit
Web-based Clients Install Web-based Clients if you want to manage Historian administrative tasks and analyze the data using components such as Configuration Hub, the Web Admin console, Trend Client, and REST APIs.

To use Web-based Clients, you need a UAA server to handle user authentication. UAA provides identity-based security for applications and APIs. It supports open standards for authentication and authorization, including Oauth2.

During the Web-based Clients installation, you can choose to install a UAA instance and Configuration Hub, or you can use existing ones.
Excel Add-in for Historian Install Excel Add-in for Historian make bulk changes to tag parameters using Excel, and then import it to Historian. You can also perform mathematical, retrieve selected data, generate reports and charts, and so on.
Excel Add-in for Operations Hub Install Excel Add-in for Operations Hub if you want to query historical data of objects and object types defined in Operations Hub.
Standalone Help Install Standalone Help to access the Historian product documentation offline.
Historian ETL Tools Install the Historian Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools if you want to transfer data where there is limited internet connectivity.
Historian Remote Management Agents

Remote Management Agents (RMA) include Remote Collector Manager, which is used to manage collectors remotely.

RMA is installed automatically when you install collectors. If, however, you are using RMA version 8.1, and you want to upgrade only RMA (and not the collectors), use this option.
Historian OPC UA HDA Server Install the OPC UA HDA server if you want to use Historian as an OPC UA HDA server. You can then connect any OPC UA HDA clients with the server.