Configuring the Ignition Module

Configuration has three parts: create a collector in Factry Historian, create a historian profile in Ignition, then enable history on the tags you want.

Create a collector in Factry Historian

The module authenticates as a collector, so it needs its own collector record and token. Use one collector per Ignition Gateway. That keeps measurement ownership, collector health and troubleshooting readable. Sharing one collector between gateways mixes their measurements.

Open Factry Historian and navigate to Collectors

Click Create collector

Select the time series database that should receive this gateway's data. This is required: measurements are onboarded automatically on first write, and a collector without a default database leaves them in Discovered instead, where Ignition cannot read or write them.

Give it a name that identifies the gateway, for example ignition-plant1

Save, then click Generate token and copy the token

The token identifies the collector and carries the Historian endpoint, so it is the only value you paste into Ignition. Treat it as a credential: it grants write access to that collector.

Create a historian profile in Ignition

Go to Services > Historians > Historians in the Ignition Gateway and click Create Historian. Select Factry Historian from the list of historian types.

Field	Default	Description
Token	empty, required	Collector token generated in Factry Historian. Host, port and collector identity are read from it, so there is no separate endpoint field.
Use TLS	off	Use TLS for the connection to Factry Historian. Turn this on for any Historian reached over a network you do not fully control. Leave it off only for a plaintext endpoint, such as a local test server or a reverse proxy that terminates TLS.
Skip TLS verification	off	Keeps encryption, but stops verifying the server certificate. Testing only.
Custom CA certificate (PEM)	empty	Paste one or more PEM-encoded CA certificates, or a self-signed server certificate, to trust in addition to the system and bundled Factry CAs. Use this instead of skipping verification when the Historian sits behind an internal or enterprise CA. The certificate's host name must still match the host carried in the token.
Debug logging	off	Verbose logging for this profile. Useful while setting up, noisy afterwards.
Tag path delimiter	empty	Controls how measurement names are split into a tree in the Ignition tag browser and Power Chart. Empty shows a flat list. / builds a hierarchical tree out of the measurement name. Another character, for example ., splits on that character instead.

Save. The historian status should show as Running in the Historians list.

Settings changes take effect in place: the profile reconnects and refreshes its measurement cache without restarting the module or the gateway.

Tag setup

Configuration is done per tag in Ignition Designer. Nothing needs to be configured in Factry Historian. Once a tag is set up here, Factry picks it up automatically.

To historize a tag:

Open Ignition Designer

Navigate to the tag you want to historize

Open the tag editor and go to the History properties

Set History Enabled to true

Set Storage Provider to the profile you created

Set Include Metadata to true if the tag's description and engineering units should reach Factry. Ignition sends tag metadata to a historian only when this is on

Configure the rest as needed:

Sample Mode: how often to check whether a record should be collected

Historical Deadband and Deadband Style: how much a value must change before it is stored

Min Time Between Samples: minimum interval between stored records

Max Time Between Samples: maximum interval, useful to ensure a value is stored even when it hasn't changed (e.g. once per hour)

Repeat for each tag you want to historize, or use tag groups and UDT definitions to apply settings in bulk. New lines or tags added to Ignition later follow the same process, with no changes needed in Factry.

Standard Ignition sample modes and deadbands apply unchanged. Factry stores whatever Ignition decides to store, and applies no further compression to data arriving from Ignition.

What happens in Factry

Measurements are created automatically on the first stored value of each tag, and the data type is detected from that value. Measurement names are <tag provider>/<tag path>, so a tag Area1/Line2/Temperature in the default tag provider becomes the measurement default/Area1/Line2/Temperature, owned by the Ignition collector.

Everything after that is normal Historian work, done in Factry rather than in Ignition:

Asset properties. Link the new measurements to asset properties so they appear in the plant model. That is also what makes them browsable from Ignition under Assets, and what makes them usable in Grafana, calculations and events.

Metadata. With Include Metadata on, the tag's description and engineering range are applied when the measurement is created: engUnit becomes the unit of measure, engLow and engHigh become the measurement's minimum and maximum. Alarm limits are not taken from Ignition, so set those in Factry if you need them. This happens at creation only, because measurement metadata cannot be updated afterwards, so a tag historized before Include Metadata was turned on keeps an empty description and unit until the measurement is recreated. Anything else Ignition sends is kept as measurement metadata.

Retention. A property of the time series database itself, for example an InfluxDB retention policy. It is not configured in the Historian interface, and not in Ignition.

Verification

To confirm data is flowing:

Open Factry Historian and navigate to Measurements

The measurement should appear within a few seconds

Select the measurement and check the data preview to confirm values are arriving

Navigate to Collectors. The Ignition collector should be Active and Collecting

You can also query Factry data from within Ignition directly. In Ignition Designer, open a Power Chart, browse to Factry measurements in the tag browser, and add a tag to the chart. Because Factry registers as a native historian provider, this works using standard Ignition historian functions, including measurements from sources other than Ignition.

Ignition refreshes its measurement cache every 30 seconds, so a newly created measurement can take that long to appear in the Ignition tag browser, even though it is already visible in Factry.

Next: Using the module.