This application is a demonstration of how we can forward MXAccess data from Wonderware System Platform to the open source Influx Data time series historian with store/forward and zero data loss.
##InfluxDB/InfluxData The InfluxData stack, also affectionately known as the TICK stack, is a collection of applications centered around the InfluxDB open source time series historian. Here are a couple links to help you read up on the project and get excited about the possibilities before you continue on.
The pace of innovation in the Industrial historian space is notoriously slow. While the major historian vendors do tend to have a decent feature set, the high cost and lack of velocity for new features has long been a source of frustration. I have been following the InfluxDB project since the very early days. I've watched it grow from what was ultimately a side project for a larger effort to a full blown stack with very real potential for usage in production systems.
At this moment (late 2015) I think the stack might still be lacking in some features that would make it an acceptable replacement for a traditional historian. However, I have no doubts if a decent community coalesced around the effort within about 6 months I think we could produce a historian that would be viable in a number of manufacturing environments. Maybe 6 months to a year after that an you could look at the platform as a replacement in high reliability installations.
It's quite obvious that Paul Dix and the team at InfluxData are really sharp and apparently well funded. I have little doubt they will keep up the pace of innovation and all we need to do is round out the feature set to make it a more familiar experience for users of traditional historians.
First off, in it's current state, this is nothing more than a proof of concept. I have one major feature implemented in a functional manner, store and forward, but there is a lot of work to turn this into a codeset that might be relied on for a real-world application.
Here's a YouTube Video demonstrating the main features of the application, including store/forward.
To configure the application you need to define settings in two files.
MXAccess.json
{
"subscribetags": [
{
"tag": "Sim_001.val[1]", "influxtag": "SIM_001_001"
},
{
"tag": "Sim_001.val[2]"
},
{
"tag": "Sim_001.val[3]"
},
{ "tag": "Sim_001.val[4]" },
{ "tag": "Sim_001.val[5]" },
{ "tag": "Sim_001.val[6]" },
{ "tag": "Sim_001.val[7]" },
{ "tag": "Sim_001.val[8]" },
{ "tag": "Sim_001.val[9]" },
{ "tag": "Sim_001.val[10]" }
]
}
In this file you define the tags you wish to subscribe to via MXAccess. The only requirement is that you are running the application on a node with a deployed platform. Another feature is that you can explicitly define the InfluxDB tag you wish to use. Currently I map [,], and . to _ to simplify tag retrieval on the Influx side. Over time I think we can definitely improve this, probably with a regext pattern for replacement.
influx.json
{
"password": "aaInflux",
"URL": "HTTP://192.168.120.1:8086",
"userid": "aaInflux"
}All of these items should be pretty obvious if you have an Influx stack up and running.
##Performance So far I have only tested with 10 tags but testing with 500, 1000, and 10,000 tags is one of the most immediate priorities.
The project is compiled against .Net 4.5.2.
All testing was performed against Windows System Platform 2014R2 P01 and InfluxDB 0.9.6.1
The vagrant file I used to the Influx and Grafana machine is located here VAGRANT file
##Path Forward For now I would like to implement a modest number of additional features before pausing and focusing on application stability so that it might be trusted in a production environment.
No special build notes other than needing to restore Nuget packages on build. See the platofrms section above for specific versions.
##Testing No tests have been written yet. This would be a nice project for someone to pickup.
##Chat Room
Check out the Issues List
##Contributing Check out the Contributing file
- Andy Robinson, Principal of Phase 2 Automation.
- See list of Contributors on the repo for others
MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.