Plants in today’s industrial environment produce enormous volumes of data every second from sensors, alarms, control systems, and other sources. Effective industrial data management is critical for optimizing operations, improving reliability, and enabling data-driven decision-making.
However, many plants:
- Either struggle with scattered, siloed data sources that make it difficult to get a unified view of operations.
- Or find themselves obligated to mobilize an important investment on tag-based software licenses for historians.
Why Centralized Industrial Data Management Matters
Centralizing plant data is no longer a luxury but a necessity. By collecting and storing data in a centralized repository, organizations can unlock valuable insights, improve operational efficiency, and accelerate digital transformation initiatives.
Our OPC Easy Archiver is designed to help plants achieve this centralization effortlessly. It collects real-time and historical data, along with alarms and events from multiple OPC servers, and archives everything into accessible databases or flat files, providing a reliable foundation for data analysis and reporting.
The Industrial Data Challenge in Modern Plants
Modern industrial plants are powered by a wide range of systems: PLCs, SCADA, DCS, HMIs, historians, and intelligent field devices each generating valuable data. However, this data is frequently scattered across multiple different platforms, protocols, and storage locations. The result? Information silos that make it difficult to see the full picture of plant performance.
Common challenges include:
- Disparate data sources: operators and engineers often need to navigate multiple systems just to access simple data points
- Limited historical tracking: without a centralized storage system, retrieving historical trends or alarm sequences becomes time-consuming and error-prone.
- Slow decision-making: when data is fragmented, teams can’t respond quickly to process deviations, equipment failures, or inefficiencies.
- Integration issues: feeding plant data into analytics platforms or enterprise systems becomes complex without standardized, centralized access.
These challenges not only slow down day-to-day operations but also hinder initiatives like predictive maintenance, root cause analysis, and digital transformation.
By Leveraging standard database servers, our OPC Easy Archiver allows end users to handle these challenges with minimum investment on software licenses.
Meet OPC Easy Archiver: Your Centralized Data Logger
Our OPC Easy Archiver is a robust OPC client application designed to reliably collect and historize industrial data from OPC DA, HDA, and AE servers. Whether data is coming from local or remote sources, the archiver captures real-time values, historical process trends, and critical alarms or events, and stores them securely in widely used databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft Access, or in flat files like CSV.
This flexibility ensures seamless integration with existing enterprise systems and makes it easier for teams to use archived data for reporting, analysis, and decision-making.
The OPC Easy Archiver provides a suite of features that go beyond simple data collecting, making it incredibly resilient in demanding industrial environments. It supports store-and-forward buffering, which prevents data loss during temporary communications outages with database servers, and it captures alarm and event data to provide complete visibility into operational disruptions or safety-related incidents.
It also includes intelligent automation rules that allow users to define actions such as sending alerts, overwriting tag values, or restarting data archivers based on specific conditions. Additionally, it supports data flow in both directions, meaning users can write data back from databases to OPC DA servers, further enhancing control and flexibility. With these capabilities, OPC Easy Archiver acts not just as a data logger, but as a critical layer of protection for industrial data management and integrity.
Key Features
Centralizing and managing your plant data isn’t just about moving data into one place, it’s about doing it reliably and efficiently OPC Easy Archiver delivers on all fronts. Here is how:
- Multi-Protocol Support (DA, HDA, AE)
OPC Easy Archiver is designed for broad compatibility with OPC standards, making it ideal for mixed environments with legacy and modern equipment. It supports:
- OPC DA (Data Access) for real-time process values.
- OPC HDA (Historical Data Access) for collecting historical trends
- OPC AE (Alarms & Events) to capture critical alerts and status changes
This multi-protocol supports ensures that no valuable data is left behind, regardless of its source.
- Flexible Data Destinations:
One of OPC Easy Archiver’s biggest strengths is its wide range of storage targets, allowing you to archive data in the format and location that best fits your IT infrastructure:
- Relational databases like MS SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Azure SQL
- Microsoft Access for smaller-scale or local storage
- CSV files for portability and simplicity
Using standard ODBC/OLEDB connections, the system integrates seamlessly into existing enterprise data flows, making it easy to connect archived plant data with reporting, analytics, or visualization tools – key components of any industrial data management strategy.
- Store-and-Forward Reliability
Unreliable network connections or temporary server failures shouldn’t mean lost data. OPC Easy Archiver features store-and-forward mechanisms, ensuring that:
- Data is locally buffered during connection issues
- It is automatically forwarded to your database server once connectivity is restored
- Your records remain complete and continuous, even across outages.
- Automated Rules and Triggers
With OPC Easy Archiver, you can configure rules-based automation to react to specific data conditions or events.
Examples include:
- Sending email alerts when thresholds are exceeded
- Automatically starting/stopping the archiving process
- Logging events or taking action based on alarm conditions.
This intelligent automation reduces the need for manual oversight and enables proactive maintenance and operations.
- Cost optimization
The OPC Easy Archiver is cost effective solution for OPC data logging as its license does not depend on the number of connected servers or the number of tags. With the OPC Easy Archiver, you can:
- Connect to multiple OPC servers simultaneously, local or remote
- Centralize data from distributed control systems (DCS), PLC networks, or edge devices
- Store everything in one central database, or keep site-level separation as needed.
This flexibility makes it suitable for enterprises aiming to implement a cohesive industrial data management strategy across global operations.
Download User Guide
Use Case Example: Monitoring Compressor Performance
Imagine a manufacturing plant monitoring multiple compressors across different lines. Each compressor exposes real-time and historical data via OPC DA and HDA servers. With OPC Easy Archiver:
- Data is collected continuously (temperatures, pressures, run hours)
- Alarms (e.g., high vibration) are logged using OPC AE
- Data is archived to a central SQL database
- A power BI dashboard visualizes compressor performance trends and alerts maintenance teams when thresholds are breached.
The result? Centralized visibility, predictive maintenance, and less unplanned downtime
Benefits of Centralizing with OPC Easy Archiver
When you centralize plant data using OPC Easy Archiver, the benefits go beyond convenience:
- Improved Visibility and Decision-Making:
Operators, engineers, and analysts gain access to clean, consistent data across all systems enabling better analysis, root cause investigation, and optimization.
- Easier Regulatory Compliance:
Traceability is critical in regulated industries. OPC Easy Archiver helps you maintain audit-ready data records, including alarms, process values, and historical logs automatically.
- Analytics Integration
Archived data is stored in standard databases making it simple to plug into:
- Predictive analytics models
- Cloud platforms for data warehousing
- Reduced Downtime and Better Reliability
With its auto-reconnect features, OPC Easy Archiver ensures you don’t lose data when connections drop providing a more reliable data backbone for your plant and improving overall industrial data management efficiency.
Start Building a Unified Data Backbone
As industrial plants embrace digital transformation, centralized data is the foundation for smarter decisions, reduced downtime, and competitive advantage. OPC Easy Archive provides the tools to capture and centralize your plant’s most valuable asset – its data – in a way that is cost effective, reliable, and easy to implement.
OPC Easy Archiver empowers you to:
- Unify disparate data streams
- Enable real-time and historical analysis
- Support modern analytics and compliance needs
Start centralizing your plant data today and unlock the full value of your industrial operations.
