REST API to Expose Historian Data

Sharing an interesting POC that I previously worked on. For this client, siloed data was a big issue on the way to fully utilize the benefit of AI, BI and ML. To resolve this issue, they wanted to expose their historian data (Ignition) in a controlled manner. We could use native API but API customization options didn’t fit their need. So we came up with a custom REST API solution using Node.js. These APIs exposed different tag, calculation and alarm data from backend SQL server. To retain more control over the exposed data, e.g., exposing summary vs raw data, we exposed custom SQL server views. These APIs support CRUD operation that was a perfect fit for that client and they had a platform agnostic solution to integrate a plethora of applications on the other end. Here’s a simple execution of such API shown on Postman that exposes Ignition tag data from SQL server using Node.js.

If you are seeing similar need of such API for your enterprise, you can explore this path. You may wonder, how to implement such solution for noSQL DB based historian like OSIsoft PI. Hold on! I will post about that next week.