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If you're running Ignition, you know the setup. You tag a data point in Ignition, assign it a path, set storage parameters, build the plant model. Then you open your historian and do it all again. Same tag. Same structure. Different system.
That duplication is already annoying when you have one line. It compounds when you have ten. And every time a new line comes online, two people (the OT engineer and whoever manages the historian) have to coordinate to make sure nothing falls through.
That changes today.
Introducing the Factry Historian Ignition Connector
The Factry Historian Ignition Connector uses Ignition's historian API to read the configuration you've already done. You mark a tag for historization in Ignition → Factry picks it up automatically. No second setup. No plant model duplication. When a new line is added to Ignition, Factry starts collecting it without any additional configuration.
Technically: the connector uses Ignition's historian API (available from Ignition 8.3) to register Factry as a historian provider. You mark tags for historization in Ignition Designer, setting storage mode, deadband, and sampling interval per tag. Those tags are streamed directly into Factry Historian. Nothing needs to be configured on the Factry side.
What you can do with the data
Ignition's built-in historian stores data to be consumed back inside Ignition. That works fine for SCADA-level use cases like trend views, alarm history, or operator dashboards. But it keeps data inside one application.
Factry Historian takes a different approach. Once Ignition data lands in Factry, it sits alongside your other OT and IT sources. It's accessible from Grafana, Excel, Power BI, REST APIs, and LLMs. Engineering teams, analysts, and management can work with production data in the tools they already use without needing access to the SCADA system.
The integration is also bidirectional. Because Factry registers as a native historian provider, Ignition can query data back from Factry using standard Ignition historian functions including data from sources not originally collected by Ignition. Useful for surfacing calculated values, aggregates, or context from other systems directly inside Ignition's Power Charts and dashboards.
Performance
Ignition's built-in historian (the Core Historian introduced in 8.3) is designed for short-term, operational access. At scale and over longer time horizons (months or years of tag data) query performance can degrade. The older SQL-based historian is slower still.
Factry Historian uses aggregation pushed to the database layer, so query speed stays flat regardless of the time window. Querying a year of data takes roughly the same time as querying a week.
How to get started
The Factry Historian Ignition Connector is open-source, documented on GitHub. Free to try (there's a 2-hour runtime, restart anytime). There's no heavyweight installation required. The Factry Ignition module itself is a .modl file that installs natively in your Ignition Gateway in a few clicks.
This video tutorial should help you set up quickly:
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