Hi All - my company is starting to use groov EPIC as the standard platform for new internal equipment and for pulling together some facility/process I/O, but we also still have legacy SNAP-PAC, Allen-Bradley and Siemens PLCs that will be around for a while, and will be bringing in new equipment with not yet determined PLC architecture.
What I’m trying to solve immediately is a reliable historian for a few hundred tags at maybe 1–10 second rates, with decent tolerance to outages/network interruptions, and something that won’t be a pain to implement or maintain. Longer term, I’m doing this to secure the data, and make it available to clients like SPC analysis software, Excel, Grafana, etc. The current solution of log files, even if stored in a central location, is not sustainable.
I would also like to make sure that I’m considering another relatively near-term need, which is live tag access by other clients, like an MES system, SCADA HMI’s, etc.
My current understanding is basically this:
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Canary seems like the more historian/analysis-focused solution, and maybe the better fit if the main goal is historical logging, trending, and analysis.
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Ignition seems like the more flexible overall platform, since it looks like it could both historize data to SQL and also make live tag data available to other systems later.
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My concern with Canary is that it might leave me still needing another “live data” layer later if MES or other software wants current values/tags, whereas Ignition may cover both roles.
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My concern with Ignition is that it may be a little heavier in terms of setup/cost/overall platform than I actually need if the main requirement today is just historian + future accessibility.
I should also note that I know Node-Red et al. can handle many of this, but I really don’t have enough knowledge myself, nor the time or resources to home build a solution. Can’t justify the upfront and ongoing investment, bugs, outages, etc. I really just want to buy something that lets me easily log historical data to a database AND make tags available for consumption by other clients, with minimal fuss and complication.
Am I understanding that correctly, or am I missing something important? For a mixed Opto / AB / Siemens environment like this, what would you recommend? Thanks in advance for your input. I did scour the forums for guidance, but still had some unanswered questions.