Installing Factry Historian for production use

This guide will help you install Factry Historian with standard settings for a production-ready installation. It is written for technical users who are comfortable working with a terminal and know basic networking concepts.

At the end of this guide, you will find additional steps to configure TLS certificates, external authentication providers, proxy servers, and other settings.

During this guide, you will have to configure users, passwords and secrets. We recommend storing these secrets securely, for example in your password manager.

Prerequisites

Before you start, make sure you have the following in place:

License

Infrastructure

System Resources

Networking

License

To download Factry Historian and install it for production use, make sure you have obtained a license key and signed a license agreement with Factry. If you have not done so already, please contact Factry to obtain a license.

Once both are in place, Factry will provide you with access to the Factry Historian portal. On the portal, you will be able to download all binaries needed for this guide.

Infrastructure

A supported version of Ubuntu server LTS (Download latest Ubuntu LTS image)

Terminal access with administrative privileges

System Resources

Load	Writes / second	Queries / second
Low	< 5.000	< 5
Moderate	< 100.000	< 25
High	>= 100.000	>= 25

Low

CPU: 4 cores

Memory: 8 GB RAM

Database disk: >= 500 IOPS

Moderate

CPU: 8 cores

Memory: 16 GB RAM

Database disk: >= 1.000 IOPS

High

High loads should be tested before being deployed to production:

CPU: 16 cores

Memory: 64 GB RAM

Database disk: >= 1.000 IOPS

Required disk space starts at 100GB and should be expanded based on expected write load.

Networking

To install and access the services using this guide:

Internet access to download Factry Historian and prerequisities

A fixed (local) IP adress for the server

For a standard setup, the following ports should be available before starting the setup:

Factry Historian: TCP port 8000 (HTTP) and 8001 (gRPC)

Grafana: TCP port 3000

Install Dependencies

1. Update package list and download wget

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wget

2. PostgreSQL

Install PostgreSQL

sudo apt-get install -y postgresql postgresql-contrib

Verify if PostgreSQL is running

sudo systemctl status postgresql

Create PostgreSQL superuser

Replace <username> with your desired username (e.g. factry)

You will be prompted to enter and confirm the password for the PostgreSQL superuser.

sudo -u postgres createuser -s <username> -P

Create Grafana database and administrator user

Open the PostgreSQL CLI:

sudo -u postgres psql

Then perform the following commands. Replace <'password'> with your desired password (e.g. 'my-password', keep the surrounding '). Replace <username> with your desired username (e.g. factry).

CREATE USER grafana WITH ENCRYPTED PASSWORD <'password'>;
CREATE DATABASE factry_historian OWNER <username>;
CREATE DATABASE grafana OWNER grafana;
exit

The first line creates the grafana user. The second line creates the database factry_historian with the given username as the owner. The third line creates the database grafana with the grafana user as the owner. The fourth line exits the postgreSQL CLI.

3. InfluxDB

Download and install InfluxDB

The first line downloads and installs the InfluxDB (v1.12.x) database which stores the time-series data points and logs collected via Factry Historian.

cd /tmp
wget https://dl.influxdata.com/influxdb/releases/v1.12.4/influxdb_1.12.4-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get install -y ./influxdb_1.12.4-1_amd64.deb
sudo systemctl enable --now influxdb

Verify if InfluxDB is running

sudo systemctl status influxdb

Create InfluxDB users

Open the InfluxDB client CLI.

influx

Create a user with administrative privileges in InfluxDB.

Replace <admin_username> with your desired administrator username (e.g. factry) and replace <password> with your desired password (keep the ' around the password).

You will be prompted to enter and confirm the password.

CREATE USER <admin_username> WITH PASSWORD '<password>' WITH ALL PRIVILEGES;

Shows the users available in InfluxDB, check if the admin user is created.

SHOW USERS;

user admin ---- ----- [admin_username] true

Exit the InfluxDB CLI.

exit

Configure InfluxDB

Open your text editor of choice and make the following changes:

sudo vi /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf

In the [data] section:

edit query-log-enabled to false to disable (an abundance of) queries being captured in the logs.

In the [http] section:

edit auth-enabled to true to enable authentication on InfluxDB.

edit log-enabled to false to disable (an abundance of) API queries being captured in the logs.

Make sure to remove the # before the indicated lines for them to be picked up as configuration and not as a comment.

[data]
query-log-enabled = false

[http]
auth-enabled = true
log-enabled = false

After making changes, restart InfluxDB for the changes to take effect

sudo systemctl restart influxdb

4. Grafana

Download and install Grafana

Download the latest supported version of Grafana, by following their guide. E.g. for version 12.1.1, use the following commands:

sudo apt-get install -y adduser libfontconfig1 musl
wget https://dl.grafana.com/grafana/release/12.1.1/grafana_12.1.1_16903967602_linux_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i grafana_12.1.1_16903967602_linux_amd64.deb
sudo systemctl enable --now grafana-server

Configure Grafana

Open your text editor of choice and make the following changes:

sudo vi /etc/grafana/grafana.ini

In the [database] section:

edit type to postgres to setup the Grafana internal database with PostgreSQL

set hostto localhost:5432(or the host:ip of your PostgreSQL database)

set name to grafana to set the database name

set user to grafana to set the user to connect (user created in 2.PostgreSQL )

set password to the password of that user (Replace <my-password> with the password and keep the surrounding """ to allow special characters)

set ssl_mode to disable to successfully connect with the PostgreSQL database over localhost

Make sure to remove the ; before the indicated lines for them to be picked up as configuration and not as a comment.

[database]
type = postgres
host = localhost:5432
name = grafana
user = grafana
password = """<my-password>"""
ssl_mode = disable

After making changes, restart Grafana for the changes to take effect

sudo systemctl restart grafana-server

Verify if Grafana is running

sudo systemctl status grafana-server

Install Factry Historian datasource in Grafana

Install the Factry Historian datasource plugin in Grafana to easily fetch Historian data in Grafana, and restart Grafana for the changes to take effect.

sudo -u grafana grafana-cli plugins install factry-historian-datasource
sudo systemctl restart grafana-server

5. Lock dependency versions (Optional)

Lock the versions of the installed services to prevent unintentional updates to the installed services when (automated) patches are performed on the server.

sudo apt-mark hold postgresql influxdb grafana

6. Install Factry Historian

Login to the Factry Historian Portal and download the Factry Historian installation executable for your CPU architecture.

Navigate to https://portal.factry.cloud

Once logged in, click Downloads in the header menu

In the Downloads panel:

Select a release channel (Stable)

Select a product (Factry Historian)

Select a version

Select an OS/Platform (Linux/AMD64)

For an offline installation, click Download to download the binary and manually copy it to the host system. For installation on a system with internet access, click Copy URI to copy the link and download it with e.g. wget.

Place to executable on a location where you have write access e.g. your home folder.

Replace the factry-historian-server_vx.x.x filename with the filename of your executable. Perform the command(s) in the CLI:

chmod a+x factry-historian-server_vx.x.x
sudo ./factry-historian-server_vx.x.x install

Verify if Factry Historian is running

sudo systemctl status factry-historian-server

For more options and details, follow Downloading and Installing Factry Historian server.

7. Synchronize server time with NTP (Recommended)

Show the time and date on the server and the state of NTP synchronization.

timedatectl

Check if the time and date are set correctly. Note that the timezone is typically set in UTC: Compare time between different timezones.

Check if NTP service states active, which indicates that the server is synchronized with an NTP server.

Local time: Wed 2025-09-17 12:35:41 UTC Universal time: Wed 2025-09-17 12:35:41 UTC RTC time: Wed 2025-09-17 12:35:41 Time zone: Etc/UTC (UTC, +0000) System clock synchronized: yes NTP service: active RTC in local TZ: no

Is the date and time not correct or the NTP service is not active? See the Troubleshooting section.

8. Confirm service availability

Verify if you can access Factry Historian and Grafana in the browser:

Historian: http://xx.xx.xx.xx:8000

Grafana: http://xx.xx.xx.xx:3000

If that is not the case, see the Troubleshooting section.

Make sure to use http:// in your browser. Some browsers override it automatically to https://, in which case use an incognito window.

🎉 Congratulations! You have successfully installed Factry Historian and Grafana.

Next steps

Security

For additional security, we recommend the following additional steps:

Add HTTPS: reverse proxy Factry Historian and Grafana, then install the certificates on the proxy webserver.

Configure the firewall

Configure external Authentication Providers

Configuration

Further configure Factry Historian according to your preferences. Consult the Reference documentationReference documentation.

Data collection

Add and configure a collector

Troubleshooting

Services: See logs

These lines show the service logs of the according service unit with -u, and with -rsorted in reversed time order (newest logs on top).

journalctl -u postgresql -r
journalctl -u influxdb -r
journalctl -u grafana-server -r
journalctl -u factry-historian-server -r

Services: Verify if port is accessible

Check if the server is accepting TCP connections (replace xx.xx.xx.xx with your Factry Historian Ubuntu server IP address) on the appropriate port. For example, with telnet:

telnet xx.xx.xx.xx 8000

If successful, the output states Connected to .... Press CTRL + ] and CTRL + C to exit the command.

NTP synchronization for correct date and time

Open the NTP synchronization settings using your editor of choice:

vi /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf

Change the configuration to point to public NTP servers, or configure your company's NTP servers.

An example with Ubuntu's NTP servers:

NTP=ntp.ubuntu.com FallbackNTP=ntp.ubuntu.com

Save the file and exit your editor.

Restarts the timesyncd service for the changes to take effect. Next, enables NTP synchronization. Then check if the status of the timesync service is set to Active.

systemctl restart systemd-timesyncd
timedatectl set-ntp true
systemctl status systemd-timesyncd

Need help?

Contact Factry for licenses, support, or migrating from legacy historians.