Tag Providers

Tag Providers

At the highest level of Tag configuration is the Tag Provider. A provider is a Tag database (a collection of Tags) and a name. An Ignition Gateway can have any number of Tag Providers, and therefore the name is used to distinguish which provider a Tag comes from. Tag Providers can be set up with security or even disabled independent of each other.

Every copy of Ignition has its own Tags, spread across one or more Tag Providers. With the remote Tag Provider, Ignition can also see the Tags on another Gateway, as long as the two Gateways are connected through a Gateway network.

All Tags reside in a Tag Provider and have realtime values. Additionally, there is the concept of Tag historian providers, which can store and query historical data for Tags. Each Tag can optionally have a historian provider assigned to it to whom it will report value changes for historical storage.

Realtime Provider Types

There are two types of Realtime Tag Providers that you can choose from:

Standard Tag Provider

Standard Tag Providers store all configuration and do any execution (read, write, history, alarms) through the local Ignition Gateway. Every new Ignition installation automatically creates a Standard Tag Provider named "default." You can add as many Standard Tag Providers as you want. This provider can be exposed or hidden from other Gateways on the network through the Gateway's OPC UA settings.

Remote Tag Provider

Remote Tag Providers connect a remote installation of Ignition and access those Tags. The remote Tag Provider works by creating a link from the local Gateway to a Tag provider on a remote Gateway using a Gateway Network connection. The local Ignition may be allowed to read and write to the remote Tags, but any execution is handled by the remote Gateway. So, things like writing to a PLC, alarms, and history will still be handled by the remote Ignition.

Put another way, "tags" in a remote tag provider are simply representations of the tags as they exist on the remote system. By default, a Remote Tag Provider will fall under the Default Security Zone and be read only.