With digital transformation accelerating across the industrial space, automation is becoming an increasingly essential part of the industrial data architecture. Enterprises are looking to new data protocols and systems that can support their automation requirements, and many companies across industries have chosen OPC.
What Is OPC?
Open Platform Communications (OPC) is a series of standards and specifications that facilitate the exchange of data between industrial automation hardware and software from different manufacturers. By standardizing communication across devices and platforms, OPC can facilitate more integrated and efficient industrial operations and help build scalable, flexible, and secure automation systems.
OPC was originally released in the late 1990s and included OPC Data Access (DA), Alarms & Events (AE), and Historical Data Access (HDA). These specifications are now known as OPC Classic. In 2008, these use cases were integrated into a single framework known as OPC Unified Architecture (UA) was released.
How OPC Enhances Industrial Automation
- Interoperability: OPC enables diverse industrial equipment and software systems to communicate with each other by providing a common interface that abstracts the underlying hardware differences.
- Security: OPC UA, in particular, includes built-in security mechanisms such as encryption, authentication, and auditing, which are crucial for modern industrial applications that may involve remote monitoring and control.
- Functionality: OPC standards support a wide range of functionalities including real-time data monitoring, control commands, alarms and event management, historical data analysis, and more.
- Industry Adoption: OPC is widely adopted across various industries such as manufacturing, energy, utilities, and oil & gas, due to its flexibility, reliability, and support for cross-platform interoperability.
How TDengine Supports OPC
TDengine can ingest data from OPC UA and OPC DA sources, in addition to legacy historians and other protocols such as MQTT.
With TDengine’s no-code connectors for OPC UA and OPC DA, you can begin ingesting data from an OPC server in seconds.
After configuring your server information, click Connectivity Check. When the connection has been established, you can specify the OPC data points that you want to replicate into TDengine.
After you have configured your data points, click Add, and TDengine will begin ingesting data according to your specifications. For detailed instructions on setting up OPC as a data source, see the official documentation for OPC UA and OPC DA.