About Historian Data Collectors

The Historian Data Collectors General manual is intended for people who install, use, and maintain data collectors in an Historian archiving system. This manual provides descriptive material and specific operating procedures for performing all common tasks.

Many data collectors exist to bring data into the Historian Server, as listed in Supported Windows Versions for Historian Collectors.

Since installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting from a Historian perspective are essentially the same for all collectors other than the File Collector, this chapter summarizes the characteristics of each and highlights their differences. It also provides a detailed description for File Collector, since it differs from the other types of collectors.

A Data Collector gathers data from a data source on a schedule or event basis, processes it, and forwards it to the Historian Server for archiving. The following figure shows the data flow in a typical Historian system from a data source to the archive.


Data Collectors use a specific data acquisition interface matched to the data source type, such as iFIX EDA (Easy Data Access) or OPC 1.0 or 2.0 (Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control). For more information, see Supported Acquisition Interfaces. The Simulation Collector generates random numeric and string data. The File Collector reads data from text files.

The following table provides information on whether each collector is toolkit-based and whether is consumes a CAL.
Collector Name Is Toolkit-Based? Consumes a CAL?
iFIX Collector No No
iFIX Alarm Collector No No
Server-to-Server Collector No Yes
Server-to-Server Distributor No Yes
OSI PI Collector No No
Calculation Collector No Yes
OPC UA Data Access (DA) Collector No No
Windows Performance Collector Yes Yes
ODBC Collector Yes Yes
OPC UA Collector Yes Yes
OPC HDA Collector Yes Yes
Wonderware Collector Yes Yes
Cygnet Collector Yes Yes
MQTT Collector Yes Yes
OPC Alarms and Events Collector No No
Simulation Collector No No
File Collector No No
Limitations:
  • When failover occurs from a primary collector to a secondary collector (or vice versa), there will be some data loss as the collector tries to connect to the source to fetch the data.