Geo SCADA with Wonderware Historian / eDNA

[justinoj]

Hello Experts, 

Our customer is requesting for a proprietary historian software for storing Geo SCADA trend/event/alarm data. Requirements does not specify Wonderware historian, however, I'm familiar to Wonderware historian. 

Which third party Historian is capable of storing trend, event, alarm data for up to 20 years? Any historian for easy to integrate with Geo SCADA for exporting history data and also to display is highly recommended. It shall be easy to display as trend in native trend windows or activeX controls. 

Please provide recommendations.

Thanks in advance,

Justin

[BevanWeiss]

I'm probably slightly biased here, but I've had good results with OSIsoft PI.  Which is now part of AVEVA.

HOWEVER... you've asked for:

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...capable of storing trend, event, alarm data...

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I think that you will really struggle to find a historian that does the event / alarm data.

OSIsoft PI will happily do the historic point data stuff.  We've got customers using it with over 20 years of data already without many problems.

But, for things like Event (text) / Alarm (text) data, historians really don't do it... since it doesn't have much meaning in a historical context.. you can't graph it, or trend it, or compare it.. it's just stored.  So for this, you could just keep it stored in Geo SCADA and archived at an appropriate interval.

We have had a customer that did indexing and storage of the Event Journal data (which includes alarm info) into a product called 'Splunk', whose entire purpose is to index and filter text log information.  They turned it off after a few years.  The licence cost was large, and the benefit was almost non-existent.  There really wasn't any meaningful reason to go back more than a few months to see text records of stuff.

For alarms, there were historical records of the point value and alarm state=1.. so it's easy to look over decades of data to find point value = 1 events.. you can even do a MAXIMUM historic aggregate for that to see what intervals had at least one alarm event...

If you were super keen on it, then possibly going with an open source solution like ElasticSearch might be worth while for the text data.

I would not really recommend Wonderware Historian.  The customers that have it currently generally regret their choice.  It doesn't appear to scale very well.  This might change with the introduction of Insight Historian.. but that's still a bit up in the air (and I believe is a cloud only offering).

[justinoj]

Hi Bevan,

Thanks for sharing your experiences.

Regards,

Justin