Recap of some of the key insights shared by Founder & Principal Consultant at recultiv8, Coenraad Pretorius, on switching from a traditional data historian to a modern, industrial stack.

InfluxDB is a time-series database platform for collecting, storing, and analyzing time-stamped data, offering tools for monitoring, observability, and IoT applications. From this resource users can learn about time-series data modeling, querying, and visualization to monitor and analyze their systems' performance and behavior in real-time.

InfluxData

Traditional industrial data historians face challenges with complexity, high licensing costs, slow insights, and limited analytics capabilities. A modern approach separates edge systems (real-time ingestion, operational dashboards) from cloud systems (long-term storage, advanced analytics) using open source tools like InfluxDB 3 and Telegraf. This architecture delivers simpler systems with familiar tools (SQL, Python), faster dashboard performance, lower costs through consumption-based pricing, and flexible data pipelines supporting industrial protocols like OPC UA and MQTT. A case study demonstrates $70k upfront savings and $5k annual savings while handling 10k+ tags across four OPC UA servers.

From Legacy Data Historians to a Modern, Open Industrial Data Stack

The challenge with traditional data historians

A modern, open architecture: edge + cloud