Background
Many AVEVA PI customers are seeking to integrate their data into Business Intelligence (BI) tools for additional data analysis. One of the most commonly used BI tools is Microsoft Power BI. Tools such as Power BI allow users the ability to aggregate and analyze their data in different ways beyond what tools like PI Vision can offer. Often, Power BI dashboards are used to show data from more than one data source as well.
AVEVA provides various solutions for integrating PI data into Power BI. Some examples include the PI SQL Client, PI OLEDB Enterprise, and the PI Web API REST API. This article concentrates on two AVEVA offerings—AVEVA Connect and the PI Integrator for Business Analytics as they require minimal coding. Additionally, the article discusses a software called SignalX, which is also a popular zero-code option for data transfer from PI and AF to Power BI.
AVEVA Connect
AVEVA Connect, a cloud platform, natively integrates with AVEVA PI servers, Edge Data Stores, and adapters. Users consume data either through trends directly within Connect or use APIs to view the data in other tools. Connect can ingest data from non-PI sources, such as AVEVA System Platform, or data generated programmatically through the Open Message Format (OMF).
PI data ingestion into Connect is done using two methods: the PI to Connect Agent or OMF messages.
The PI to Connect Agent enables the transfer of on-premises data to Connect data services securely. Additionally, it transmits license usage information from the connected Data Archive for customers using AVEVA PI Data Infrastructure with aggregate tags.
OMF defines a standardized set of message headers and bodies for creating messages that can be ingested into compliant back-end systems. This helps facilitate data acquisition on platforms without OSIsoft library support. Custom applications can send data to Connect using OMF data structures.
Once data is in Connect, the Connect Power BI Connector enables direct access to Connect’s data views. Users can modify the query generated by the connector within Power BI to adjust date ranges, change the interpolation interval, and enable incremental data refresh.
AVEVA PI Integrator for Business Analytics
In contrast to Connect, the PI Integrator is an on-premises solution that must be installed within the same domain as the PI system components. The PI Integrator sources its data from PI AF and sends it to a variety of publish targets in a batch or streaming manner. The software supports endpoints such as relational databases, data lakes, warehouses, and file targets are supported. Furthermore, it also supports streaming endpoints including Apache Kafka, Azure IoT Hub, Amazon Kinesis, and Google Cloud Pub/Sub.
The PI Integrator for Business consists of three key services:
- Framework Service: Manages the creation, publishing, and scheduling of views, balances workloads across Worker Nodes, and tracks view statistics.
- Sync Service: Monitors view shape changes and scheduled asset views or streaming views
- Worker Node: Publishes jobs to target destinations. Multiple Worker Nodes can be added for improved performance.
Once the software selects and transforms the data, the Worker Node publishes it to the selected destination. The PI Integrator Sync ensures that data between PI and AF destination remains synchronized. In Power BI, users access the data by connecting to the destination database, such as a SQL database, without requiring third-party connections.
SignalX
SignalX is an operational data connectivity platform that can integrate data between on-premises and cloud data stores. It can extract, transform, and transfer data in batches or as streaming data. The software is often used to collect data from OT endpoints such as SCADA systems, OPC data sources, or historians such as AVEVA PI and AF. SignalX then typically sends this data to cloud endpoints such as Azure, AWS, or other on-premise endpoints such as relational databases. SignalX may also be used to send data back to PI and AF from cloud-based or on-premises endpoints. While sending data, SignalX can perform several transformations on the data, including filtering, substitution, augmentation, pivoting, and others.
The software can relay data across different network layers to ensure compliance with network boundaries and segmentation requirements. Moreover, SignalX is a fully redundant and scalable system. Currently supported connections include:
- AVEVA PI
- AVEVA AF
- Database (SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL, SQLite)
- ODBC
- MQTT
- VT SCADA (as data source only)
- ADLS – Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2
- Azure IoT Hub (endpoint only)
- Azure Event Hub
- ADX – Azure Data Explorer
- Snowflake
- Databricks and Unity Catalog
- Kafka (endpoint only)
- AWS S3 (endpoint only)
- Generic REST (source only)
- SFTP
- File System
We Can Help
MetaFactor has strong expertise in this area and can help with your needs. Please reach out to us for more information.