Overview of the OSI PI Collector

The OSI PI collector collects data samples from an OSI PI data server and stores it in the Historian Server or a cloud destination. You can collect data directly from the OSI PI Data Archive v3.2 or later via OSI PI AOSI PI v1.3.4 or later.

Topology: This collector supports a distributed model, where the PI Data Server, the collector, and Proficy Historian are installed on different machines. The OSI PI collector must be installed on the same machine as the OSI PI Data Archive.

The OSI PI collector uses unsolicited collection, whereby changes to the OSI PI archives are detected, and are forwarded to the Historian server. The collector is intended to duplicate raw samples from the OSI PI Data Archive in an Historian data archive. You can specifically request the collector to transfer values from the OSI PI snapshot cache (as seen in the previous version of OSI PI Collectors), however, it is recommended to transfer the values directly from the PI archives to the Historian archives.

One OSI PI collector instance can collect data from a single OSI PI data archiver. To collect from multiple OSI PI data archives to an Historian archive, you must configure multiple OSI PI collector instances.

Features

  • You can browse the source for tags and their attributes. Tag browsing performance with OSI PI has been confirmed as satisfactory up to 130,000 tags. Beyond that threshold, OSI PI may take a long time to return the large number of tags. In such a case, it is recommended that the tags be exported from PI to an Excel work sheet and then uploaded to Historian.
  • Only the unsolicited data collection is supported; polled collection is not supported.
  • The supported timestamp resolution is milliseconds or seconds.
  • The collector accepts device timestamps.
  • You can create Python Expression Tags for those collectors that support them.
  • Floating point, integer, string, and enumerated data are supported; Binary and array data is not supported. You can configure the OSI PI collector to automatically handle updates of digital states in Historian as enumerated sets without restarting the OSI PI collector. For instructions, refer to Configuring Auto-synchronization of Digital States.
    If digital states are renamed or deleted in the OSI PI collector, the corresponding enumerated sets in Historian are not automatically renamed or deleted without restarting the PI collector. Unused enumerated sets cannot be automatically deleted, because the PI server does not notify the collector about the rename or delete activity. Therefore, you must manually rename/delete digital states.
    Note: In some instances, OSI PI digital tags, which are created as enumerated tags in Historian, can contain values from the PI System digital set, rather than their assigned digital set. In these instances, the System digital values will be reflected as 0 with BAD quality in Historian.