Ignition Edge has been revised and expanded significantly as of release 8.0.10. This deprecated page is for User Manual legacy records. The Edge Products section contains the five product configuration that was available until 8.1.33.

Welcome to Edge

Edge is a stripped down version of Ignition that is specifically designed for use as an Edge of Network device. 

Prior to 8.0.10, there are currently three Ignition Edge plugins that can be used: Panel, Enterprise, and MQTT. Each offers its own features and you can combine them however you'd like to create the system you need. Often, Panel and Enterprise plugins are used together to create a simple way to keep local fallback terminals up to date.

Panel

Ignition Edge Panel enables edge-of-network HMI functionality with robust Ignition features, including: one local client, one remote client, and alarming features including email notification. Ignition Edge Panel includes one week of data buffering for trending and local client fallback for mission-critical applications. 


Enterprise

Ignition Edge Enterprise acts as a limited remote server that shares data such as Tags, history, and alarms from the edge of the network to a central Ignition server by leveraging the Gateway Network. Edge Enterprise comes with up to a week of data buffering so it can be used to store-and-forward your data to a central server in case of network failure. Edge Enterprise also acts as an EAM agent, so if you have the EAM module installed centrally, you can also take advantage of centralized management of all of your Gateways.

MQTT

Ignition Edge MQTT by Cirrus Link uses the highly efficient MQTT protocol to transmit data to any MQTT broker and supports the Sparkplug data-encoding specification.


Edge Products

Ignition versions 8.0.10 through 8.1.32 offered the following five Edge Products. 

Products extend Edge's capabilities, each adding a unique set of features. There are five Ignition Edge products available: Panel, IIoT, Compute, Sync Services, and EAM. Products can be mixed and matched to create the system you need. Please note that a license is required to activate each of the Ignition Edge products. Each Edge product offers specific functionality that works best in certain scenarios, but because any combination of products can be installed, an Edge Gateway may fill multiple roles and help bridge different architectures.  

Ignition Edge Panel creates a standalone HMI at the edge of network. Either Vision or Perspective may be used.

Additionally, both the Web Browser module and Symbol Factory image library are included in Edge Panel. 

Ignition Edge IIoT turns any device into an edge gateway that publishes data to an MQTT broker. (IIoT was formerly Edge MQTT.)  The product allows access to the MQTT Transmission, Opto22 SNAP PAC driver, the Emerson ROC driver modules, and the ABB Totalflow driver (manual installation required). In addition, Ignition Edge IIoT exposes Edge’s OPC UA server to external OPC UA clients.

Ignition Edge Compute enables you to remotely run scripts and create REST APIs for interfacing with third-party applications. The product allows access to Python scripting, Gateway Event Scripts, and the Web Dev module. 

Ignition Edge Sync Services synchronizes data from the edge of the network to a central Ignition server. The product allows access to Sync Services, remote Tags and alarm pipelines, Tag history sync, alarm history sync, and audit log sync. 

Ignition Edge EAM brings diagnostics, automatic backup and recovery, central licensing, and project synchronization to your edge-of-network device. The EAM product allows this Edge Gateway to be an Agent in an EAM architecture.

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Edge Architecture


Panel

Ignition Edge Panel enables edge-of-network HMI functionality. This includes: one local web-launched client, one remote web-launched client, and alarming features including one-way email notification. Ignition Edge Panel includes one week of data buffering  for trending and local client fallback for mission-critical applications.



Enterprise

Ignition Edge Enterprise acts as a limited remote server that synchronizes data from the edge of the network to a central Ignition server. It has Distributed Tags, history, and remote alarming built in. Remote backup, restoration management, and centralized monitoring of performance and health metrics are also available if the Ignition Enterprise Administration Module (EAM)  is installed on the central Ignition server. Edge Enterprise comes with up to one week of data buffering so it can be used to store-and-forward your data to a central server in case of network failure.


MQTT

Ignition Edge MQTT by Cirrus Link turns virtually any field device such as a touch panel or a client terminal into a lightweight, MQTT-enabled Edge Gateway that works seamlessly with Ignition IIoT. Ignition Edge MQTT uses the highly efficient MQTT protocol to transmit data to any MQTT broker and supports the Sparkplug data-encoding specification.


What's Different About an Edge Gateway?

All Edge installations are a limited version of the Ignition platform for a significantly reduced cost. This helps keep things simple, and these installations always work with other full versions of Ignition if you need additional functionality. In Edge installation there are a lot of visual changes to the Gateway Webpage, and some pages have been removed to avoid confusion. You can see below that after installing Edge, the traditional orange Ignition logos are replaced with new green Edge logos so a Gateway can be easily identified. For more information, see Edge Gateway.

Licensing

The new Edge version of Ignition has a separate license that works in the same way as a traditional Ignition license. The Edge license will not work if you attempt to activate it on an Ignition Gateway as it is only setup to license an Edge Gateway and its modules. However, you can activate a full Ignition license on an Edge Gateway, but this is not recommended due to the limitations of the Edge platform not being able to fully utilize the unlimited nature of an Ignition Gateway. Additionally, once a license has been activated on an Edge Gateway, the trial time for any unlicensed Edge plugins will be removed, and you will not be able to access them.

Projects

Edge installations only ever have one project. It is automatically created if it did not exist, and it cannot be removed. The default name is "Edge".

The following feature is new in Ignition version 8.0.8
Click here to check out the other new features
As of version 8.0.8, the Edge project can be renamed. For more information, see Edge Gateway Config section.

Database Access

Database access is disabled. This means that any database queries or bindings will not work, and the user sources that require a database connection will not be available. The Status and Configure pages of the Gateway Webpage have been updated to remove these features and reduce confusion. Despite this restriction, some "historical" storage can happen inside of Ignition.

One Week of Internal Storage

An Edge installation can store certain historical data inside Ignition. 

  • Tag history - Up to one week or 10 million data points of history can be stored locally. Pruning will automatically happen, and the historian is automatically enabled and not configurable. An Edge Gateway can only have one realtime Tag provider and one Edge historian.  You can learn more about tag history here. 

    The following feature is new in Ignition version 8.0.8
    Click here to check out the other new features

    As of version 8.0.8, the Edge Tag provider and Edge Historian can be renamed. For more information, see Edge Gateway Config section.

  • Alarm Journal - The alarm journal will store all alarm events locally for one week of events. There are limited configuration options; the Alarm Journal can be accessed via the Edge Alarm Journal profile. The Edge alarm journal and audit log can sync under EAM.

  • Audit Logs - Like the Alarms, the Audit log is limited to one week of local storage. It can't be configured.

Gateway Scripting

All Gateway level scripting is disabled including Gateway Event Scripts and Tag Event scripts. This does not affect project or client scoped scripts.

Gateway and Project Backups

A Gateway backup made in an Edge installation will work perfectly in other Edge installations. Edge Gateway Backups are not compatible with Ignition Gateways, so you may not take an Edge Gateway Backup and restore it on an Ignition Gateway. Nor may you take an Ignition Gateway Backup and restore it on an Edge Gateway.

However, you can still export Tags, windows, and other project resources in the Designer from full Ignition Gateways, and import them into an Edge project, or vice versa. 

OPC Limitations

The internal OPC UA server in the Edge Gateway acts only as a client and not as a server. This means Edge can connect to other outside OPC servers as a client to fetch data, but can not act as an OPC UA server for outside programs to connect to.

EAM Architectures

Edge Gateways can not be configured as Controllers in EAM Architectures. However, Edge Gateways can be Agents. 


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