Wonderware Online InSight Data Ingestion Made Easy by rIoT Technology
Wonderware Online InSight is a secure, managed solution for collecting, storing, and visualizing industrial data for faster and smarter business decisions. It consolidates disparate data for complete visibility into how your business is performing and enables users, throughout the enterprise, to access data from anywhere. rIoT Technology makes it extremely easy to collect the process data and push to Wonderware Online InSight.
The following picture is a block diagram that shows how this can be done:
rIoT Link module receives data from the process controllers via Modbus TCP or Serial, OPC, hard-wired I/O or user defined communication protocols. The data received through the client interfaces are mapped to the server streams (Wonderware Online InSight tags in this example). Since bandwidth is a premium, rIoT Engine uses advanced event generation, communication throttling and channel management to send data only when it is needed to transmit. This is fundamentally different from the legacy historian collectors that are cautiously sending data which leads to much higher cost.
The rIoT Link Module used in this use case is a crLink-X that is a Linux machine and has 120 GB local disk space and can provide local monitoring and HMI in the station. crLink-X is a ruggedized machine that has a built in cellular modem and works with a variety of network operators. Using Linux as the host OS for the rIoT Engine makes the solution much more stable and secure.
The link between rLink and Wonderware Online InSight is secured by the bearer token provided by Wonderware Online InSight.
Using rIoT Technology and the rLink module, connection to Wonderware Online InSight is up and running in less than ten minutes.
Step One
Define the client connection to the PLC in the rIoT Explorer. Through a bunch of Wizards, you choose the right communication protocol, the device address and define the client database.
Step Two
Define the connection to Wonderware Online InSight. All you need is to create a data source in Wonderware Online InSight and copy the end point and bearer token. The end point and bearer token need to be pasted into the rIoT Explorer interface as shown below.
Step Three
Map the process points to Wonderware Online InSight tags. rIoT Explorer provides easy wizards and interfaces to link the process data to the historian tags.
Step Four
Save the configuration and download into the rIoT Engine. rIoT Engine picks the configuration up immediately and starts pushing data into the historian via the wireless link. Picture below shows the values populated from a random variable.
Alternative Configuration
For security reasons, many clients do not want the process network be connected to a device that has cellular connectivity. In this case, we offer a solution as shown in the following diagram:
Here, we use a gateway machine (rGLink) to send the data to the network. The link between the two machines is a secure one way serial link that only goes from rLink to rGLink. rGLink acts as a secure DMZ, therefore, there exists no access to the station’s network by malicious agents.
Next Step
If you are looking into managing your process and field data intelligently, we need to talk. This example showed you that using rIoT Technology, you can easily acquire your process data and push into IoT platforms such as AT&T M2X, Verizon Thingspace, Microsoft Power BI, GE Predix and Wonderware Online InSight for further analysis. The data collected by the IoT platforms can be visualized locally on the process schematics. Note that you can start with a single asset and expand to a large-scale implementation as you wish. For more information about rIoT Technology, please visit us at www.avistarts.com.
