Edge Sync Services

Agent Gateway

Ignition Edge Sync Services, acting as an Agent Gateway in a secure, high-performance Ignition Gateway Network, can share information with other Ignition Gateways through Distributed Services, including distributed tags, history, and remote alarming.

Store and Forward

Data Synchronization

Synchronization allows you to sync your historian data, audit records, and alarm journal entries from the Edge Gateway to a Standard Ignition Gateway, allowing you to save past the one week data limit. The Edge Gateway will still only see the one week of data that it can hold internally, but it will allow you to store the data in a more permanent database that can be viewed from other Ignition systems.

Before data can be synchronized across Gateways, your Standard Gateway's system must be configured to accept Edge storage. This can be completed by navigating to Config > Security > Service Security and select Query and Storage for the sections you will be receiving data from such as Alarm Journal Access, Audit Log Access, or History Provider Access.  

Once you've allowed storage access, you can navigate back to your Edge Gateway to finish configuring your synchronization settings under Config > Enterprise Services > Settings page.

The following table describes the synchronization settings.  

Sync is unique in that if the connection to the remote Ignition Gateway is severed, the Edge Gateway will use its week of storage as a Store and Forward buffer, allowing you to store up to a week of data before data is lost. Once the connection is restored, the Edge Gateway will send data over based on the max batch size and data frequency until all previous data is sent.

Sync Reset

Edge has a way to reset synchronization state for remote services. If you restored a Gateway backup onto a system with existing locally "syncable" configuration files, then the backup may have IDs from a range beyond the local files. Use the Reset action button to reset your local sync configuration.

To do a Sync Reset, go to Edge Gateways under Config > Enterprise Services > Sync Reset.

Select Reset for the desired configuration to perform a Sync Reset.

Remote Alarm Notification Profiles

Sync Services allows alarms in the Edge gateway to invoke remote alarm pipelines, via a remote alarm notification profile (configured on the Edge gateway). 

Local alarm pipelines may not be used with Edge.

For more information, see Alarm Notification Profiles. 

Remote Tag Provider

With Edge Sync Services installed, Ignition Gateways will be able to create remote tag providers, targeting a provider on an Edge Gateway: either the system provider or the one realtime tag provider. Before attempting to create a remote tag provider, make sure you have a valid Gateway Network connection. 

To expose Edge remote tags to your central Gateway: 

1. Navigate on your central Gateway Config > Tags > Realtime.
2. Click Create new Realtime Tag Provider.
   
   
   
   
3. Select Remote Tag Provider (Gateway Network).
4. Click Next. 
5. Select your Edge Gateway. 
6. Click Next.
7. Customize your tag provider settings as desired. 
8. Click Create New Realtime Tag Provider.

Now that you’ve created your remote tag provider, you can access your central Gateway’s designer and see your new remote tag provider. You can read your tags, but still need to configure security before you can write to them. If you try to write at this point, an error message will appear because the default security zone settings restrict write access to these tags. 

To configure system security to allow writing to tags:

1. Navigate to Config > Security > Security Zones on your central Gateway that houses the remote tag provider to make sure you have a Security Zone for your Edge Gateway. 
2. Click Edit (or Create new Security Zone if you don’t have an existing option) and specify your Edge Gateway IP address, Host Names, or Gateway Name in the Identifiers property settings. You can have multiple identifiers configured, but in order to be placed into this security zone the incoming connection only has to match one of the identifiers.
3. Click Save Changes.
4. Navigate to Config > Security > Service Security. 

5. Click Edit for the Security Zone your Edge Gateway belongs to.
   

   After policies are defined on at least two zones, you'll notice Move Down and Move Up button options are displayed. Use these as needed to make sure your Security Zones are listed in the correct order. If your incoming connection falls into multiple security zones, the one it falls into first is the one that will be used. 

6. Scroll down to the Tag Access section to change your Access Level setting to Read/Write.

7. Locate the Access Level setting for your Edge tag provider and use the dropdown to select ReadWrite.

   Note: If you want to enable ReadWrite access for all tags in this security zone, you can select ReadWrite for the Default Provider Access Level setting.
    
   
   

   
   

8. Click Save.  

With the changes to the security zone in place, you can now write to the tags without an error message and any values entered into the tag on your central Gateway will update in the actual tag provider on your Edge Gateway. Follow this same procedure and select ReadWriteEdit to allow tags to be edited from a remote Designer.