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In Ignition 8.3, Inductive Automation did something that most SCADA vendors haven't: they published a historian API and so invited the ecosystem to build on it.
This article describes it as: "8.3 introduces a new public API that enables module developers to implement their own historians, making Ignition a platform for building historians." Not just a platform with a historian → a platform for building historians. The distinction matters.
Their own implementation of this API is the Core Historian, backed by QuestDB, introduced alongside the API. Fast, zero-configuration, built for operational data access within the Ignition environment. It's a strong foundation for the first job a SCADA historian needs to do.
But the door is open. And the community has started walking through it.
What the historian API actually enables
The new API gives you an edge over the old one in that:
• Aggregation can happen inside the database/historian
• We can store metadata
• We can store annotations
A third-party module can now register itself as a historian provider within Ignition's Gateway. When an operator or engineer queries historical data in Ignition (via Power Chart, Easy Chart, or Ignition's scripting functions) queries are passed through to the external historian automatically. The external system handles storage, aggregation, and retrieval. From Ignition's perspective, it behaves like a native historian.
The other direction works too. Because Factry registers as a native historian provider, Ignition can browse Factry measurements including data from sources that have nothing to do with Ignition directly inside Ignition's standard historian UI.
This is what "open platform" actually means in practice: not just that the data is technically accessible, but that the integration is first-class.
What Ignition integrators have been building
Jasper Louage is an Ignition implementation partner at Mustry Solutions. When the 8.3 historian API became available, he built a module that uses it to connect Ignition tag historization directly to Factry.
Here's the setup walkthrough. It's practical and worth watching if you're an Ignition integrator or thinking about how an external historian would fit into your architecture:
The key things it demonstrates:
- Tags marked for historization in Ignition Designer are automatically collected by Factry -> no separate configuration in Factry required
- The historian provider appears natively in Ignition's Services > Historians list alongside the Core Historian
- A collector token from Factry is the only credential needed. URL, TLS setting, token, done
- Ignition's Power Chart can browse and query Factry measurements directly, including data from sources outside Ignition
- Because aggregation is handled at the Factry database layer, query performance stays flat regardless of the time window. A week and a year query at the same speed
The IA community forum thread on the new QuestDB historian shows that integrators had questions about HA, backup, and long-term scale from day one. An external historian with its own storage, backup, and access model addresses those questions directly.
Why this matters for your architecture
Ignition handles real-time control, monitoring, and operational data access. It's excellent at this and the Core Historian is an excellent operational historian. But operational data access and organisation-wide analytical data access are different problems with different requirements, as we wrote about in this article.
The historian API means you don't have to choose. You can have Ignition do what it does well (SCADA, HMI, real-time operations) and give an external platform the second job: long-term storage, cross-source context, access from Grafana, Excel, Power BI, and APIs, for teams outside the OT environment.
This is also the direction the Ignition Technology Ecosystem is moving. Multiple technology providers are building historian and analytics products on the Ignition platform.
Ignition has built the door. The ecosystem is walking through it.
Factry Historian is an open industrial data platform for process manufacturers. It connects to Ignition via a native module using the 8.3 historian API. Get in touch to learn more. Get in touch with us to learn more.
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