PI System has been a core component of industrial data infrastructure for decades, and many companies rely on it to process and store their invaluable operations data to this day. However, as PI System begins to show its age and companies look for more modern alternatives, they often find themselves “locked in” to the PI ecosystem, unable to rip and replace existing deployments and unwilling to risk unnecessary complexity and siloization by introducing new data solutions.
TDengine, an AI-native data platform for the industrial IoT, makes the transition easier by offering a zero-code data connector for PI System. After installing TDengine at new sites, you can stream data from existing PI Points or Asset Framework (AF) templates into TDengine TSDB, consolidating data from new and old systems so that you can use it in TDengine IDMP or in PI Vision. The data connector also handles extract, transform, and load (ETL) and enables automatic backfill after any disruptions.
In this way, you can obtain the benefits of a modern cloud- and AI-native data infrastructure without sacrificing the stability or performance of existing production sites, keeping your current systems in place while you take the next steps toward digital transformation.
How It Works
TDengine’s data connector for PI System uses the AF SDK to query historical data from PI Data Archive, set up PI and AF data pipes for streaming data, and connect to PI AF to query the AF structure. It also creates the required tables and writes this data over a secure REST API to TDengine.
The TDengine Data Reference is an AF Custom Data Reference that queries data within TDengine and allows users to interact with TDengine as though it were a PI Point within the PI Data Archive. In this way, TDengine data can be used alongside PI data in PI Vision.
To use the PI System data connector, you create data ingestion tasks in TDengine — real-time tasks for streaming data and backfill tasks for historical data. You can ingest data from PI Data Archive, mapping individual PI Points to tables in TDengine, and from AF Server, mapping AF elements to tables in a multi-column model.
For complete instructions, see our official documentation. You can test the data connector yourself with a free 15-day trial of TDengine TSDB-Enterprise — simply pull a TDengine TSDB image to your local machine and run it in Docker.
A Smarter Path Forward
Instead of manually uploaded files and unmaintainable custom code, TDengine offers a solution that automates data centralization, gets data to the cloud while maintaining its context, delivers built-in AI/ML features, and integrates with industry-leading analytics and BI tools. And unlike traditional industrial data platforms, which lock customers into closed systems that leave them at the mercy of vendors when it comes to pricing and third-party integration, TDengine makes big data accessible and affordable to everyone.
With TDengine, organizations can continue to use existing PI System deployments while modernizing infrastructure at new sites. TDengine enables efficient centralization and sharing of data collected from any number of industrial data sources along with data cleaning and ETL, so that you can make the most of your operational data. And with its easy-to-use interface and predictable pricing model suited for the IIoT, including a free trial for new users, TDengine can be a powerful and cost-effective extension of — or alternative to — PI System for industrial enterprises.
