Inductive Automation Blog

In the automation world, the Purdue Model (also known as the Purdue reference model, Purdue network model, ISA 95, or the Automation Pyramid) is a well-known architectural framework for industrial control systems (ICS).

Eurotech will showcase the benefits of running Ignition on an ISA62443-4-2 certified device. This demonstration will highlight how Eurotech's advanced device management capabilities can simplify the process for OT systems integrators to securely manage applications remotely. Attendees will gain insights into how the integration of Eurotech's ReliaCOR 40-13 Industrial PC with Ignition software provides a robust and cybersecure foundation for industrial applications. This collaboration not only meets stringent cybersecurity standards but also enhances the efficiency and scalability.

Transcript:

00:06
David Bader: My name is David Bader. I lead business development for a company called Eurotech. Has anybody heard of Eurotech before? A few? Yep. So I've been with Eurotech for about a year. There's, I'm the least I have the least longevity with Eurotech, even for companies that are not Eurotech. There's a lot of Eurotech employees and other companies here as well. Dave.

00:21
David Woodard: So I'm David Woodard. I'm a Solutions Architect with Eurotech. I've been here a bit longer. I've been with the company for 11 years and have been in IoT and industrial automation for probably closer to 15. So pleasure to be here.

00:36
David Bader: Yeah, I beat him out in the longevity of being in the business for sure. So I've been doing automation for 40 plus years now. So I've been involved in systems integration and distribution. I worked for AWS for a short time and led robotics for AWS for a while. The idea of coming to Eurotech was to be able to bring that kind of security level that AWS and the other cloud providers offer in the cloud down to the edge. So Eurotech is, if there's one thing that you take from this, it's that Eurotech is a company that provides enablement at the edge, right? So we provide a secure way to orchestrate and maintain your systems kind of at the edge. And we're gonna talk a lot about cybersecurity today. There's two themes, overall themes, that we that we kind of talk about from Eurotech. It's cybersecurity and the ability for systems integrators and OT providers to be able to uplift your cybersecurity posture in an area where we normally would turn that over to IT, right? So the concept is if we can provide the IT level of cybersecurity down to the OT space, that's kind of gonna be the theme that we're gonna talk a little bit about.

01:55
David Bader: And then the other one is to maintain kind of a secure remote access and remote device connectivity, right? So being able to do things that you normally would do by plugging into the device remotely, but in a secure manner, right? So being able to do VPNs that have the IT kind of functionality that you would expect from an IT perspective. So I'm pretty informal. If people have something that's genuinely on your mind, say it, but we are gonna have some questions and answers at the end. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about what Eurotech does and where we are from a... why cybersecurity is super important. And I'm gonna it over to Dave at the end, that he's going to talk about this brand new cybersecurity wizard that we're introducing here for the very first time. So you guys, the very first time you're, hearing anybody's hearing about this. Dave's going to do a demo on that.

02:49
David Bader: So Eurotech's been around for 30 plus years. We're headquartered in a small town in Amaro, Italy, which is in the Northeast part of Italy, all the way up near...

03:00
David Woodard: Austria.

03:00
David Bader: Austria. Thank you.

03:01
David Woodard: Never think of it.

03:05
David Bader: We have operations in the U.S., we have a bunch of people in the U.S., we have people in Canada and all. So some of the things that we've kind of been known for over time way back in the beginning of the, of the Eurotech history, we kind of worked with some people people that worked for Eurotech at the time developed a small protocol called MQTT. Anybody heard of MQTT, right? Yeah. There's a few people that certainly know MQTT, right. So over time we've kind of evolved from kind of a board manufacturer into a industrial automation solution provider for hardware and software. So we're very excited to now be part of the Alliance Program and out in a table 11 right across the hall here is the very first Ignition Edge, a piece of hardware that is certified to IEC 62443 IEC, ISA 62443 cybersecurity standards. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about what that means to get through some of this stuff. Our portfolio is pretty big, right? We build hardware from gateways for different applications for transportation, for industrial automation, for medical, all the way up to pretty beefy GPU-based processors that run AI and those kinds of things.

04:25
David Bader: So for any kind of application, including running Ignition on any of these devices almost, we can meet your needs. But again, the differentiator is that cybersecurity and that remote device access in a secure manner, right? So I would guess, right? I've asked a few questions already. How many people talk about cybersecurity with their customers on a regular basis? So a good portion, which I would guess, right? Because you're in this room and you wanna learn a little bit more about it. What I find really interesting is there's also an equal number of people that don't talk to customers about cybersecurity, right? They say, "Hey, that's an IT function." And I think we've passed that threshold in the space where we have to talk from an OT perspective about cybersecurity because there's a large percentage of cybersecurity efforts that are being, that are stemming from the OT space. So is that something that you guys, that resonates right from an OT space? 20% of all of the attacks are happening from an OT, from the factory floor, which when I put this deck together, I was knocked out by that number. I would have thought it was 2% or 3%. It's more than 20% now. It's pretty amazing.

05:41
David Bader: So when you think about that, what does that turn? What does that kind of mean in terms of dollars? It's significant, right? So the average financial impact from data breaches way back in 2018 was seven and a half million dollars. It's significantly more now. But why, right? The concept is we have more connectivity in the factory floor now. It's not relevant that the person on the floor, he's not missing anything. He's just not been trained necessarily in cybersecurity. It goes back to that conversation earlier where I said, most people aren't even talking about it. We've got PLC systems. They're out on the floor. Anybody got GE 90-30 back still running in their plants. Right. So these things were not designed with cybersecurity in mind. Right. So and now we're asking to put more SCADA, more capability, more MES in the plant floor that are opening up all kinds of vulnerabilities, if we don't think about it. Yeah, I messed that one up. So this is just a brief slide that you can't read, right?

06:46
David Bader: That's too small. But it's a timeline of things that have happened in the world in the last 10 years or so, right? Maybe 20 years. So Stuxnet, that resonates. Everybody's heard of Stuxnet, right? That was a, that was a cyber attack that came through an HMI, right. On a machining center. So all the way up through Target got hit, Jeep got hit, BMW got hit, the Ukraine power grid, right? That's a big deal. These things are significant impacts to the world. So I picked two, two unique applications that happened in the OT space, Brunswick Corporation, billion dollar company that makes boats. They got attacked in June of '23. So that's pretty relevant, right? Really close, only a year away. And it disrupted their entire facility and it cost them 85 million dollars, right? So that's just a small company. Well, it's a big company, but it took their quarter two financials. They saw a big impact in their quarter two financials. So if I'm a CEO, I'm pretty upset about the fact that somebody was able to breach my system through a, through the factory floor. Right. And then on another level, there's a company called Applied Materials, which are big company, right? Multi-billion dollar worldwide company. February '23, still relevant.

08:09
David Bader: They got hit through one of their suppliers. So one of their major suppliers was attacked. There was a vector that came through. They were, they had vulnerable, they had access to Applied Material's systems, and it, and the attack came through their vendor. And that one cost them 250 million dollars. So we're not talking about peanuts when we're talking about OT attacks, right? This is significant dollars and significant impact to the business. And if you're a systems integrator and you're not talking about cybersecurity, in my opinion, this is a line of, sorry, in my opinion, this is a line of business, right? This is a way for integrators to spin up a new, a new way, a new piece of business, right? Talk to your customers about cybersecurity and how you can elevate it. So I'm gonna go fast. We build, everything that we do, everything that we're talking about today is about certified cybersecurity. There's a lot of ways that people address cybersecurity in the OT space.

09:08
David Bader: We think that being certified, building to standards, designing from secure by design is a significant piece, right? What we do is we have the ability from a remote access perspective to use VPNs. Everybody probably has the way to use a VPN, but we have an on-demand VPN capability that allows for automatic teardown, right? So if you're an IT guy, automatic teardown makes a big difference. Being able to connect, remotely access, do what you need to do, and then have the VPN shut down automatically. So you don't inadvertently leave it open and leave that attack vector space available. And please, Dave, jump in if there's anything that... So nobody wants to be this guy, right? Like it's not a good thing. So secure by design, right? The whole idea is if we do this right, everybody benefits, right? Suppliers of the hardware, suppliers the customer, and then we maintain that kind of security from the start, right? So again, I'm talking about secure by design. You have to build it from the beginning. It's not something necessarily that you walk in and say, yeah, I'm gonna create this really high level of cybersecurity in your plant without looking at the overall architecture.

10:31
David Bader: So you do a risk assessment, right? We don't do that. That's not what we do. I mentioned before, we provide enablement into the mitigation process. But you reach out to companies that provide cybersecurity risk assessments. They tell you where the vulnerabilities are. If you guys have that capability, that's fantastic. I think that that's a good way to do it. And then you build, you build these, you buy these features and these capabilities into the solutions that you have. So we provide hardware for running Ignition, right? But wouldn't it be great if you could buy the hardware that runs Ignition that also has this high level of cybersecurity and gives you this remote, this secure remote access capability. And that's the method that we are, that we're talking about. So we're doing it at 62443-4-2-1. So you're not gonna remember that specification. Excuse me, -4-2 as service level two, right? So Inductive Automation is already certified to 4-1. We're certified with our hardware to 4-2. And then the customer then can quickly and easily certify their entire system to 4-3. And that's really the enablement that we're offering is being able to have that customer get to a certified cyber solution in the field very quickly.

11:49
David Bader: And if we, if in the past, what you'd have to do is buy a piece of hardware that was hardened to a certain level. And it limited some of the functionality that you were able to load onto a server, onto gateway or other hardware. Right? So now with this wizard that we're going to talk about in a minute, is you can make these decisions in the field and work with the IT department to say, we wanna certify, or we wanna harden to this level. We wanna harden to 62443 right? Or we don't need to harden to that level, but we're gonna, we're not just going to leave everything open. And we'll show you, we'll walk you through a video that shows that, how that works. So what does secure by design mean, right? You wanna follow zero trust kind of principles and they're very standard and very well defined. So being able to say, we trust no one and nothing, right? So if you start to pass along keys and email certificates and all of that stuff, all of a sudden that becomes a real problem, right? That's not secure. If you're, if you have to email someone a certificate that's standing in front of a machine, inherently that's gonna be a problem because who knows who could get to his email, right?

13:03
David Bader: And then a continuous auditing and monitoring. So when we talk about zero trust, we talk about it from an entire ecosystem perspective. So we manage the certificates, the security certificates, from the TPM level, from the chip that's on our device all the way through to the IoT devices that are connected. We manage all of that. We maintain them. We keep them current and you don't have to worry about that as an integrator or as a customer or in any way. So I think that that's a really important piece. This slide, if anything you get from this presentation, the fact that Eurotech does this for you in an IoT perspective, and then also can do it all the way to the cloud. If your application calls for connecting to the cloud, that's super important, right? How am I doing? Okay. So I talk a little bit about 62443. I mentioned that maybe some have heard about it. There's a lot of things and you see here that I'm, talking about ISA and IEC 62443. Excuse me.

14:20
David Bader: So the, one of the key things is if you build to a standard, it's no longer subjective, right? So Eurotech many years ago decided that this standard was going to be kind of the worldwide, kind of the bar in which, which people should meet. Turns out that we were right. We made a good bet. It took us about two and a half years to become IEC 62443-4-2 SL2 compliant. And now we are the first and only, quite frankly, company that builds IoT hardware and enablement to that level. There's a lot of people that build to those standards, but have not yet gotten certified, right? We don't think we'll be the only ones. We think that we were the first, which is good to be first. So we use independent testing to validate that we're built to those standards. Again, what that does is it allows you to talk to your customers about building a secure system and maybe your customer doesn't want to certify. Maybe they don't wanna get to a 4-3, but you can say to them, "Hey, these are all of the components that you would need to, if you wanted to get to certify to a standard." Now, if anybody's from Europe, anybody here from Europe?

15:39
David Bader: Yeah, there's a few, right? It's not a guessing game anymore. It's required, right? You, you have to develop, you have to deliver 62443 standard products just to meet the law, just to meet the requirements. So we're an Italian company. We build in Italy and in Germany, all over the world, quite frankly, but we know that this standard is going to permeate not just in Europe, but beyond Europe, right? So what does that mean to us in the U.S. or in Canada? It's not mandated. It's not something that they're saying that we have to do, but quite frankly, it's an ROI conversation, right? It's something that when we talk to customers about this, we can put dollars and cents. I just showed you 250 million dollars right? It's pretty hard not to show the ROI on an investment in a piece of software that has a little bit more cost to it to get to that standard. But it's helping to prevent that 250-million-dollar hit, right?

16:37
David Bader: So even if the U.S. isn't mandating it, although we do mandate cybersecurity now in a lot of ways, right? It's suggested in a lot of ways. I think this ROI discussion in this line of business discussion for the integrators in the room is super important, right? We can now talk to customers about a higher level of cybersecurity at their OT level, at their OT floor. Make sense? How am I doing?

17:00
David Woodard: Fantastic.

17:05
David Bader: Okay, good. I like constant feedback. How am I doing? You guys feel pretty good so far? Okay. Nobody's left the room yet, which is very unusual actually. So I mentioned about how long it's taken and we like to show this slide on like every presentation that we do because it's actually a physical document that you get when you get to certification, right? It's not, oh I built to this standard, but I didn't get certified. No, we've actually gone through the certification. It is a physical document that we can send to you and, and say to your, to the IT team, look, we're buying product that is built to these standards. So how does this resonate worldwide? Right? There's a bunch of teams, people from Europe here. Obviously we talked about that. And then in vertical industries, right? In vertical industries, the 62443 standard it kind of travels to different areas, right?

18:00
David Bader: So if you're in industrial automation it's 62443, if you're in rail, it's Shift2Rail, energy is 62351, and so on and so on. Right. So there's, TSA is involved. So there's a lot of different almost, every standard is actually adopting 62443 as the core to the standard and then put it, putting it into individual, their individual requirements for their particular vertical industry. So I would say that in this slide, there, we'd be hard pressed not to touch every person in this room at some point in one of these verticals, right? Everybody's touching something in these verticals, right? And if we can meet the 62443 requirement, then these are all reciprocal standards that view 62443 as a, as kind of a guide, right? So if you've got a customer that's in a process automation and they're saying we need to meet TR 63069, then we can go in and have a conversation about 62443 and how that is actually 63069 at the core.

19:10
David Bader: For medical, I think medical is... Medical up there, we have medical 60601, 100% copy and pasted from the 62443 standard. So if you're in the medical space and customers are saying, "Ah, you gotta build something to 60601 standard," we can do it. We can help you. Make sense? Okay. So then I mentioned that we're certified to SL2. What does that mean, right? So I thought it was important to kind of make sure that people understood what that means. So the idea, right, is the SL1 is the components, right? To protect the components from casual access, casual mistakes and things like that. One of the things that the standard actually does is also includes tamper resistance, right? So if somebody goes in and messes with the server, there's a switch inside the server or inside the gateway, that is a bit, that ties back to our software that you can enunciate in Ignition or send an email from our software or any of those kinds of things.

20:08
David Bader: So if somebody inadvertently, a maintenance guy comes in and says, "Hey, I gotta upgrade the firmware or something on this," they can immediately get a response. You can literally shut the computer down if it's an onsite breach. So there's lots of ways that you can use that tamper resistance piece. And then SL2 is actually designed to mitigate and kind of prevent generally acceptable or generally recognized attack vectors. So Eurotech again felt that it was important enough for us to get certified to the SL2 standard. Not too many people have considered that. All the standards that we meet, not all of them, but many of them. So today, I thought that it was important that we talk about how do you get there, right? Like how do you put a... Take a computer, put it on a shop floor, what do you have to do to get to maintain that 62443?

21:08
David Bader: And these are all the steps. I'm not gonna go through every one of them, but there's at least 10, maybe more, steps that you have to do to build and harden an industrial IoT device to this standard. So what we've done is we've said, "Okay, you know, let's build something. What are these capabilities, right? So what are the advantages of having this?" There's a lot of words here, but the bottom line is that it's maintaining and monitoring to a rigorous standard the integrity of the environment, right? And then, can I ensure that it maintains that? So, yes. Right? So the idea is that when you certify, all of this gets continuously updated and as you keep your hardware and software current, it gets updated. So again, I mentioned this wizard that we're... Dave's gonna do a demo on.

22:00
David Bader: But the idea is, how does this work during deployment, right? So you can load all the software, whether it's Ignition or other software that you want. Then you walk through this wizard and it guides you to the level of security that you wanna provide at this OT space. Unheard of. Literally takes all of those steps that we talked about before. Excuse me. Now we can do it in the field and then can we be... Can we maintain that security with Ignition? Make sense? Lot of words, but pretty important. So Dave's gonna go through the video, he's gonna talk to that, and then we're gonna do questions and answers. So we went pretty quickly. Hopefully this touched a little bit. It wasn't just commercial. It was about providing some relevance to the market and where secure by design and standards really matter.

23:00
David Woodard: Great. So now that Dave's finished, we can come back to reality of doing all this, right? 'Cause if you wanna do this for a new customer or existing customer, doing all that level of security is really difficult. I think it's one of the most challenging parts of what we do, 'cause we have to understand the IT side and the OT side and how to do like, you know, understanding like that bridge is incredibly complicated and is very hard to do well. So that's why we came up with this, right? So, 'cause what I see a lot when I do integrations or when I do deployments or installations, is you don't do it. You say, "Okay, we need to get the POC working. We need to get this application working. We'll do security when once they buy in." Right? So once they say, "Yes, we wanna do it," then we do security. And then you realize that security is breaking what you did. So the wizard, what it will do for you, I'm just gonna play this video.

23:49
David Woodard: And I'll just talk while it's playing. So basically it's just a web application that's running on these gateways. So all of our gateways from the edge devices up to our more server class boxes, provides you with this walkthrough interface of setting up networking, enabling the secure elements that you need, and being able to do it while you're doing the deployment, right? Or if you say, "Okay, we just wanna get it working, but then we wanna see what happens if we enable this SSH policy. We wanna see what happens if we try to do this other thing." You can come back to this wizard, enable that feature, and see if it still works. So there's nobody on the command line, there's nobody like hacking your Linux file system stuff. There's nobody doing that crazy stuff in a working factory or in a pilot.

24:38
David Woodard: You do it in this wizard. Let the... Let our software manage it. And so here you can see it's doing the... All these things are relevant for the certification Dave was mentioning. So if you want to come here and just say, "Hey, I just wanna be IEC certified," you can click one button. It enables all those features and you're done. This video I think is three or four minutes, but you can do it in less than a minute. And I think even more importantly than that is this is not even necessary, right? So once you do this, once you say, okay, this is the standard that we want, these are the settings that we need, this is just a configuration for us, right? So you can say, okay, now I need to order 10 of these boxes, or a hundred, or a thousand. They can come preinstalled with all these settings already on there.

25:19
David Woodard: You don't have to worry about it anymore. I think the other cool thing about this, so you'll see now they're actually going through some provisioning with AWS. We can do the same thing for Azure. We can do the same thing for custom cloud endpoints. It is an extensible interface, right? So if you say, "Oh, but you know, we need this custom thing for our cloud services or for our customer," it is an extensible platform that you can add on to. So think that's it. We do have it running on this box I have here in front of me. So if you wanna come by our booth, I can plug this in and show you live what it does. We didn't wanna do that here just for timing, but, I'm happy to show that to you if you wanna come by the booth. So I think leave time for questions.

26:01
David Bader: Yeah. We have plenty of time for questions actually. Yeah. I think we have a half an hour for questions.

26:06
David Woodard: No.

26:08
David Bader: I'm just kidding.

26:10
David Woodard: Okay.

26:10
David Bader: Yeah. I'm making the guys in the booth nervous. Go ahead. Yes, sir.

26:15
Audience Member 1: So you are saying you're providing a software stack only for the remote device, the edge device, or there is also a kind of some cloud platform?

26:23
David Woodard: It's both. So there is the edge and there's a cloud platform.

26:25
David Bader: So the question, just to repeat the question, are we providing a software stack just for the device or is there a cloud platform? And Dave's answer is yes, it's both, right? So there's a component that loads to the software or to the device itself, and then there's a cloud-based product that allows you that remote device... The remote access and the remote device connectivity. Yep. And that, you know, we can shape and manipulate that depending on the scale. I mean, the whole concept going back to that first slide is, is we wanna be able to do this at scale, right? If it's one piece, two pieces, that's great. We're all for helping with that. But if it's a 100 or 200, we wanna make it super easy. See, I told you there's always somebody that leaves early. I'm just kidding. Any other questions? Come on. There's gotta be. Yes, sir.

27:13
Audience Member 2: So your own network that's used to update the unit themselves, can they, you can you use your own wire in the private cloud network as an input?

27:25
David Woodard: Yes. Yes.

27:25
David Bader: So let's repeat the question. Can we load our remote access capability onto a private cloud or onto a server or something like that? Yes. You know, it's Dockerable, it's containerized, and you can load it almost anywhere. Yeah.

27:41
David Woodard: Yeah. We have use cases where the cloud's actually running just in the factory. Like just, no, none of the data leaves that factory. It's all isolated there. So we just run the cloud directly in that factory.

27:49
David Bader: Inherently, you know, out of the box, it's running in the cloud, it's running in AWS, but we can work with you to do it anywhere. Yeah. And in fact, we have customers that build other components that buy that capability and load it onto their devices themselves and run it in their private cloud so it doesn't have to just be on our device. Yes, sir.

28:15
Audience Member 3: This is probably a dumb question, but does this only apply to your end devices?

28:22
David Bader: No.

28:24
David Bader: No. So that's what I just said.

28:25
Audience Member 3: Some of yours, but I might already have an installed base of a thousand of some other manufacturers, Linux based, whatever controller, can your software widget be configured so that I can use your software to just secure everything?

28:42
David Woodard: It is my favorite answer in the world, and I'll say it depends. So if you want that level of security, it would require you recertifying those devices. So at least taking one and saying, "Okay, we put your tech software on here, we've done all these same steps, but you have to have it re-certified."

28:56
David Bader: That's a 62443 requirement.

28:57
David Woodard: That's not... That's just a requirement. But what I'll say is, as long as your box is running Linux preferably, but we have the ability to understand how your operating system works and that we can tie into it and make these changes, then yes, we can run on other people's hardware relatively easily.

29:14
David Bader: Yep. Not a dumb question at all quite frankly.

29:15
David Woodard: No, it's a great question.

29:16
David Bader: It's a really good question.

29:17
Audience Member 3: I might not want to replace everything.

29:19
David Woodard: No...

29:19
David Bader: Exactly.

29:19
David Woodard: Yes. And if you don't need that level of security, we can also run in Docker, right? So if you just wanna deploy it and use it for remote management and use it for some of the, some security features, but not all, that's a really easy way to deploy it and at least try it and test it and see if it works.

29:34
Audience Member 3: You sell your software...

29:36
David Woodard: So that would be a service you... We don't do, right? So that is not what we get into. So we actually, we use two external companies. I'm blanking. Two, Nord is one, but I can't remember the other. But we do our own audits, so we have to send products to them. It is periodic, I think it's three times a year, four times a year. We send them new devices, they test them to say, "Yes, you're still certified." So you would have to do something similar. And those companies, and that's how they make their money, right? So it's...

30:01
David Bader: Yeah, I thought it was in here somewhere, but it's not. So yeah, I mean that's a normal thing that customers do on a regular basis.

30:08
David Woodard: But we do have contacts with these companies, so it's also, we can help you like at least make those contacts and have that discussion.

30:15
David Bader: Yeah. There's one down here.

30:18
Audience Member 4: So that's the box that you... It's also running Ignition?

30:21
David Bader: No. No, go ahead. You go.

30:23
David Woodard: So this is more... This was the first device that we certified. But this is definitely more of a what you call like a gateway or like a, I say gateway in an Ignition audience. You all think about the software, but this is like a hardware gateway. So this would be running very close to like your PLCs and stuff. You know, the box we have that's running Ignition is a more server class and if you come to our booth you'll see it. So it's got like a Intel processor. It's got more resources. You can run Ignition on this but it'll probably more for like the Ignition Edge product. Yeah.

30:56
David Bader: Yeah. Okay. We have time for one more question. Alright. Looks like it.

31:02
Audience Member 3: Sorry to ask a second question. So I'm with the utility grid sector and you have IEC 62351 TC57. Have you ever heard of NERC CIP?

31:13
David Bader: NERC CIP? I have not. NERC, NERC, but not NERC CIP. Yeah. No, but I'll tell you what, if you would, if you take a minute and when we're done, we'll go back out there and I'll write that down and we'll get you some answers on that because it just may not be on this slide and I may not have run into it. Yep.

31:34
David Woodard: There's so many certifications and regulations that's... Especially in energy, it's...

31:37
David Bader: And that's why I put this slide into deck two is to tie it all together around that core. But I think we hit the time almost perfectly, right? So we're good. We're, again, the booth is right across from this door. If you guys have any other questions or if you want people to send you a lot of emails, come see us. Yeah. Thank you.

31:55
David Woodard: Thank you.

31:56
David Bader: Great job. Great job.

Whether you're new to Ignition or just want a refresher, this session is made for all. The Inductive Automation Training team covers all the basic knowledge and fundamental features you need to get started with Ignition.

Transcript:

00:01
Jayson Thorpe: Hello everyone, welcome to Learning Ignition Fundamentals. We're about to get started here. How about that keynote, huh? I wanna thank you all for joining us for this session.

00:13
Aryanna Brown: My name is Aryanna, I am a Tier Two Software Support Engineer Team Lead here at Inductive Automation. I've been working here for about three years, and if you have ever sought support with our software, you've most likely spoken to me or my team.

00:27
Jayson Thorpe: My name is Jayson, also called JT. I'm a technical trainer, I'm on the training team at Inductive Automation. I started out in support, but I'm in the training department now. If you've taken any of the core classes or any of the other training courses we offered at Inductive Automation, you may have met me before. And today, we are talking about Learning Ignition Fundamentals. So we're gonna be going over some pretty preliminary information on Ignition, what is it, how do you use it? Why do you use it? Pretty much those big three main questions. Summarize, Ignition is a platform, it's an application development platform for you to build, design your own industrial automation applications for SCADA, HMI, MES and more. Some of the cool things about it, it's cross-platform written in Java, so it's operating system agnostic, web-based deployment and modular design. We're gonna talk about that modular design here in a moment, and the web-based deployment as we go through our demonstration today.

01:28
Jayson Thorpe: Since its inception, Ignition has evolved quite a bit. We have four different editions of Ignition to choose from. We have our Standard Edition for most use cases, we have Ignition Edge, for edge of network devices, usually gathering data, forwarding it to a more centralized gateway. We have our Ignition Cloud Edition, if you need to leverage hosting your gateway in the Cloud, this is available through web-based marketplaces like Amazon Web Services, and then we have my favorite Ignition maker edition for your home automation personal non-commercial projects. Ignition's modular design, what does that mean? Modular design essentially means that all of the major functionality you may want out of your gateway comes with a respective module, this means that you can easily customize your installation, things like the two different visualization modules we have, Perspective Vision are each their own module. Things like tag history, SQL Bridge, what this means is that you can really customize. Oh, oh. Oh, well, that's our last slide for now, anyway.

02:39
Jayson Thorpe: What this means is you can really customize your gateway or your entire network of gateways depending on what you need different gateways to do. You're not paying for things that you don't need a certain gateway to do, only for the things that you do need. So for this demonstration, we're gonna be going and installing Ignition, getting started with it, we're gonna start designing pretty quickly here. But what we wanna show you is that anybody can go to inductiveautomation.com, download Ignition, install it, and get started designing in about five minutes. Here we are in Inductive Automation's website, and anywhere at the top right, you can go and download Ignition for your respective operating system. We however, today have the downloader or the installer already downloaded, so we're just gonna run it. And we're gonna go through a basic install, which means we're gonna go with all of the core modules here.

03:36
Jayson Thorpe: Now, I said that we can download Ignition and get started in about five minutes, which in the SCADA space is a very quick amount of time to download our application. Once we download the appli... Once we install Ignition, here we are just making a couple of decisions as we go, we are gonna go with just the typical default installation to include all of the core modules. One of the things we also decided was the service name and the port that Ignition is going to use. And here we are, the gateway is already starting up, and once the gateway is installed, we pick which edition we wanna run. And what we're about to see here in the web browser, right now, we're using Google Chrome, let's create our user and password. But what we have here, in a few minutes, we've installed Ignition and we're running our gateway. Here in the web browser we're looking at the Gateway web page, which is the interface to your Ignition installation. Since Ignition is cross-platform, written in Java, you can load this on to a Linux box or of course, Mac or Windows, have your gateway running in a server box in a closet somewhere, and anybody that's able to reach that gateway over your network, will be able to interface with the gateway web page that we're gonna see here.

05:02
Jayson Thorpe: Gateway started. We're gonna start from scratch, we're actually gonna end up loading up a gateway back up here in a moment. What we see here is the Gateway webpage. Anybody who, you may notice, a local host is what we're accessing. Otherwise, this would be the IP of the gateway. Anybody on our network that can hit the gateway host can access the gateway web page. And here on the home page where we start out is where we can download some of these software peripherals to run a designer and also our Vision and Perspective run times. Next stop on our... Oh, still on the home page, we have links to the user manual, links to our community and as the exchange of our forums, different ways to get started with Ignition and to learn more about it as you go. Thank you. Now we're gonna go to status page, where we do have to log in, and the status pages is where you can get a bird's eye view of your entire Ignition sub-system. We can see the status of how many connections we have, like database connections, our device connections, how many tags we have, and even performance metrics.

06:15
Jayson Thorpe: On the config tab, the last stop of our tour here, is where you go to change any of those settings that we're looking at over in status, if we need to add a new gateway connect or add a connection, like a gate network connection, your database connection, OPC device, all of that would be configured here. Now, you may notice that green banner at the very top. One of the things I mentioned earlier is Ignition's flexible licensing. That trial mode, timer counting down from two hours is built into the Ignition platform. Anybody can download Ignition and run their gateway on this two-hour trial license where all of the core modules are fully functioning and we can build our reports, build our notification pipelines, build all of our displays and our HMIs all on this trial license. And when that two-hour timer goes up, we just go back to the gateway and reset it. Now, what we're doing right now, Aryanna is about to restore a gateway back up, which is in our downloads folder. And we're doing this to basically set up a few preliminary environmental points for our project.

07:25
Jayson Thorpe: And while this is going, let's also install the designer launcher. Now, the reason we're uploading a gateway back up is like I said, we have some project resources already built, some data points in the form of tags. And as this designer launcher is installing, me and Aryanna are gonna switch places, hot potato, and she's gonna take you through the designer once it's fully installed.

07:55
Aryanna Brown: Thank you, JT. Once we have our gateway up and running, we'll take a quick little tour and I'll show you what we've got going on in this back up.

08:11
Jayson Thorpe: Now, one thing to know is during or right now, we're not pointing to any gateways, but right now we have our launcher local to our Gateway, but Aryanna is gonna go into what are the different options for anyone on your network that may need to use the designer.

08:31
Aryanna Brown: So now that we have restored our gateway back up, let's take a look at what's in it. If we head over to the status page, like JT just showed you, log in, we're gonna see that we have some tags. Some of these I've created, we have two device connections, two programmable device simulators, so that when we show our demonstration, we can get started right away with real live unique values. And then, we have a database connection, and that database connection is for us to show trends. And as you see here, the throughput is about 0.8 queries per second, so this will show you the status of your database connection, and right now, it's healthy. I also have a partially built project in this back up that we'll go ahead and take a look at closer in the designer. First, we're gonna wanna launch our designer launcher. Now that we have this open, we're gonna go ahead and add our designer. Now, notice we have two tabs, one is on your network and the other is manual. Manual will allow you to input your Gateway URL manually should it not appear under the on your network tab. The on your network tab is gonna show you all of the Gateways it recognizes on your current network.

09:52
Aryanna Brown: Right now, it's only ours, so we're gonna go ahead and select our Gateway. Once we've selected our Gateway, we're gonna go ahead and open our designer for this Gateway, which should list all of the projects that we have configured for this Gateway. Once we get this open, we'll take a quick tour of the designer, and then we'll get started in showing you a Vision client runtime application.

10:23
Jayson Thorpe: Now Aryanna, how many designer sessions can we be running concurrently from the same Gateway?

10:27
Aryanna Brown: You can run as many as you'd like. As long as you can connect to it through your network, both I and JT can be working on the same project at the same time, if we'd like.

10:38
Jayson Thorpe: All right, I'm just gonna sign in here.

10:45
Aryanna Brown: Perfect. Now, we only have one project on this gateway, but you can create projects for each device, each substation, whichever you prefer. Now that we have our designer open, it is so pretty. Look at it. The possibilities are endless. If we head to the top left-hand corner, you'll notice our project browser, this is gonna list our various modules that can be configurable within the designer, such as our reporting module, which will auto-generate PDF reports to email, saving a directory, even print. We also have our visualization modules, Vision Perspective, scripting, any module that is configurable in the designer. Under that, you'll see we have our tag browser. In our tag browser, we have two tabs, one is tags, the other is UDT definitions with a drop down above it, to select our tag provider. UDT definitions provide a single structure of tags that map to unique data points in your server or device. If you notice we have one for compressor and one for sensor.

11:57
Aryanna Brown: Now, earlier, I mentioned our programmable device simulators, those are coming from a dairy. So these sensor UDTs are representing a refrigerator, humidity and temperature. If we head over to the tags tab, you'll see that we have real-time instances of these definitions. So we have one for each of our compressors and each of our sensors. Now that we've taken a quick little tour, I'm gonna go ahead and launch a Vision client runtime application to show you guys what operators or end users would typically see. While that's loading, I'm just gonna go ahead and show you guys. I've created a template here, notice that it says sensor three, I've only created one of these, this is a resource that we can use to dynamically create multiple instances for a given device or data type. We're gonna go ahead and log in just as operators or end users would. And this is our overview page. Notice that we have those sensor, three of our sensor templates in our overview page.

13:18
Aryanna Brown: Now, I did not create three different sensor templates, I created one and then parameterized them so that I can put in sensor one, sensor two, sensor three to give me those unique real-time values for each of those sensors. With this functionality, that means we can also read and write to and from these UDTs, and we can switch back and forth and see the unique values that these UDTs give us. Now we're gonna head over to our alarms page and let you check out some alarms. Oh, oh. We don't see any alarms. That's okay, let's head back to our designer and we're gonna configure an alarm on our UDT definition so that it takes on every single real-time instance. Now that we're in our UDT definition, we're gonna head to our sensor UDT, down to our humidity tag. Once we're in our humidity tag, we're gonna go down to alarms and add a brand new alarm, we're gonna give it a fun name, like humidity high alarm. Once we've given it a fun name, we're gonna modify the display path. Now, the display path is how it will be displayed in an alarm status table, an alarm journal table, it's exactly as described, how you would like it to display for that instance of the alarm.

14:50
Aryanna Brown: We're going to be using Ignition's expression language to dynamically create these display paths so that they are unique to each of their instances and alarms. Once we hit apply, we're gonna go down and let it know when we'd like the alarm to go active. Given that this is humidity, let's go ahead and make it 95. Once we hit Apply and Okay, you'll notice that we get alarms for each of our sensors. Look under the display path, we have this sensor one, sensor two and sensor three, I only had to configure that once and it dynamically created my display paths. Now, if you head back to the designer, you'll notice under our tags tab, each of our real-time instances for these sensors have the alarming icon showing that there is an alarm configured for each of these tags. Now we're gonna head back to our runtime application and take a look at some tag history. Oh, no. Same issue. That's okay. Just the way we modified a global resource to show you how we can get alarms, we're gonna now modify a project resource to get our tag history displayed.

16:16
Aryanna Brown: We're gonna head over to our history window, and if you notice on the left-hand side in that tag browser, there's this little clock looking icon, that means that history has been configured on these tags and they are currently storing tag history. So we're gonna go ahead and just drag and drop both of them on to our easy chart component, and now we have some values. Now, it is not... Oh, let's go ahead and take a look at it in the client. That was very quick. Easily deployable. Now it's not expected that operators be able to drag and drop. If you look here, if we get rid of this, they can no longer add them back, so we're gonna head to the designer and add a component so that operators can have the same functionality in their project client runtime that we have in our designer.

17:11
Aryanna Brown: We have a tag browse tree component that we're going to be using, and it is exactly as described. It's gonna allow us to browse our tags within our runtime application, so we do not need access to our designer tag browser. We're gonna make it pretty and formatted. And then, once we've done that, we're gonna modify the Tag Tree mode. Now, this is important because the Tag Tree mode will just differentiate between real-time tag paths and historical tag paths. Historical tag paths are tag paths that have been historized for tags that are currently storing history or have stored history. Now that we've changed that to Historical tag paths, operators can only select tags that have history. So we're gonna go ahead and hit save and watch this automatically deploy to our client. And if we get rid of our tag pens, our operators can easily drag and drop tag history onto their chart. Now, that I've gone through Vision and a client runtime application and showing you how to visualize that, JT is going to show you how to build a similar application in our Perspective module.

18:31
Jayson Thorpe: Thank you, Aryanna. So quickly, we've seen how we can manage our tags or manage the tags that are giving us the data from our devices using UDTs, make a change in one place. We see that change populate out to all of our instances. The UDTs that are giving us the real-time tag values are actually pointed to our PLCs. We made an update to one of the interfaces of our Vision client as well, and we deployed that instantaneously. And now, we're gonna go and do something similar in our other visualization module Perspective. For that, we just got word that our organization has bought some new motors. We bought some new hardware. It's installed. We have those connected through our OPC server. We're getting values from our motors in the form of tags through our OPC server. What we're gonna do here is go and design a UDT to match the motor structure in our OPC server. So we're gonna make a new data type.

19:29
Aryanna Brown: Oops, gotta go to that tab.

19:31
Jayson Thorpe: Ah, there we go.

19:33
Jayson Thorpe: In the UDT definitions tab, we're gonna create a new UDT. We're gonna call this motor and we do need to give it a parameter so that we can take the addresses for the PLCs or registers for each individual data point, tell it which motor we want to view, and we are able to redirect our OPC item paths across our server. What you see Aryanna doing here now is browsing our OPC server looking directly onto our devices for the different data points. You'll see we have at least eight different motors. All of these have an identical structure of the same two tags. This is why we're building a UDT, so that we don't have to build a new set of tags for each individual motor. We're just gonna add two of those into our UDT and then using our parameter for the motor number and Ignition's expression language, we're gonna plug in the parameter in place of that motor number to create a dynamic OPC address. Excellent. Now, we have our UDT defined. We have the two data points for every motor we're gonna want to view. And now we need to create our real-time instances, which we can do quickly with one of my favorite names in Ignition, the Instance Creation Wizard. We just have to tell it which UDT we would like to create instances of, give it a base name and pattern for the name and the parameters. When through, check that name tag name pattern.

21:13
Aryanna Brown: Oh, thank you.

21:13
Jayson Thorpe: Whew.

21:16
Jayson Thorpe: Very nice. Now, as soon as we hit Okay, we're gonna see eight instances of our motors. And using that parameter, each one is actually giving us a different value from our devices. Awesome. Now, we have the data actually coming into our system. In order to display this data, we wanna go to Perspective and start building some displays and interfaces. We're gonna build a view to not only show us information for each one of our motors, but also to be able to change the state of that motor to be able to turn it on off. So we're making a new view called motor view. We are gonna use a flex container, which in Perspective, one of the main considerations is the different sizes of screens that your sessions will be run on. What devices are your operators gonna be using? Perspective is chockfull of different layout options to be able to gracefully display your session on different device, specifically different screen sizes. And the flex container handles scaling of the components pretty nicely.

22:24
Jayson Thorpe: Now, so that we know which motor we are viewing, we're gonna add a label component here. And once again, using Ignition's expression language, which very easily can let you take different values from across your system to generate a single value, that's really where the expression language strength lies. In this case that one value we want to generate is just a string of text.

22:50
Aryanna Brown: We forgot to create a parameter.

22:52
Jayson Thorpe: Yes, we did. In order for this label to dynamically display, we do need a parameter just like our UDT definitions. There we go. Very nice. And after this label, we're gonna go and... Well, let's finish configuring this label here first. Now, since we've added the parameter, we can easily go and browse any of the properties across this view of all the components. Right now, the one we want is that motor number parameter. Just so this view is a little bit more interesting to look at, we're gonna go into the symbol factory, which is a library of scaled vector graphic images built into Ignition for us to use in our projects here. We have a simple motor four that looks pretty nice, but now we need to get the components to not only see the value of some of our motor tags, but also to be able to control the state of them. We have an HOA tag that we're gonna use to turn our motors on and off. So we're gonna grab a multi-state button for that, which lets us view and send out a read or... Sorry, a write to a tag.

24:02
Jayson Thorpe: So we're gonna go and use that parameter to once again set up an indirect binding, this time directly to any of our motor tags. Once we switch out the motor number with our dynamic parameter and make this binding bidirectional so that we can not only get that value and see it, but also send a signal back to the tag from this component. We need the same binding on this other property to indicate a value. So we're just copying the binding, pasting that real quick. And let's go into preview mode in the designer and turn on read and write mode. And let's see that motor one HOA tag change value now. Excellent. And all we have to do is change the value of that parameter to point to a different motor, but I think we've proven the point. Now let's get an LED display to actually see how much current's running through our amp or through our motors. And then, we're gonna go and quickly get this displayed over into our session. For this LED display component, we just have to once again bind to any of our tags using our parameter, we can dynamically redirect our view instances.

25:23
Jayson Thorpe: All right. Now, we have all of the information for our motors displayed. We're gonna go and create one more view, and we're gonna load that up with a few different displays to show to our users depending on the size of the screen they're viewing our session on. We're using a Breakpoint Container here. Remember I said Perspective's all about displaying your session on different screen sizes. The Breakpoint Container has two Subcon Containers. One will display when we're beneath a certain width, width being the container or the size of the screen being displayed on. And for the small view for when our operators are on their mobile devices, we're gonna use a carousel component for this. Carousel component, we've all seen it's equivalent on various webpages. Something that just takes an image or a set of cards can swipe them horizontally.

26:23
Jayson Thorpe: We're gonna load up this carousel component with different instances of our motor view. You can see here Aryanna is just telling our carousel, which view we want to embed, setting a unique value for that parameter. And just like that, we have four instances of four of our motor devices coming in through our OPC server. And now, we have to build out the large view. What are the users gonna see when they're on a, when they're viewing our session on a monitor or a wide screen. For that, we have a tab container. Tab container also has multiple sub-containers that can display on demand. For this tab container, we're just gonna deep select this container here, and we have two views in the learning Ignition fundamentals folder that we pre-built for this demonstration. And we're just taking those views and embedding them directly into this tab container. And then here, Aryanna is just adding more views. She's gonna name those tabs something useful. And then, we're gonna go and get this view right into our session as a webpage.

27:50
Jayson Thorpe: All right. So, I don't know if anybody's been timing me, but how long has it taken us since we started building our UDT? 10 minutes? Maybe maybe about 13. We're about to take all of that work and get it all in front of the people that need to see it. All of our operators running our session. So, let's see. Oh, view can't do...

28:08
Aryanna Brown: The tab containers.

28:08
Jayson Thorpe: That itself?

28:09
Aryanna Brown: Yeah. I'm not sure, it's embedded.

28:14
Jayson Thorpe: Delete that?

28:15
Aryanna Brown: Yeah. Okay. Here. And drag and drop.

28:22
Jayson Thorpe: There we go.

28:35
Aryanna Brown: Well, we may need to only have alarms stick.

28:38
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah, but deep select it.

28:39
Aryanna Brown: I do.

28:40
Jayson Thorpe: Let's try one more time. Interesting.

28:45
Aryanna Brown: I think it's the view itself.

28:47
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah. Oh, I see.

28:48
Aryanna Brown: Yeah.

28:49
Jayson Thorpe: It did drop it inside itself. Okay, cool. So delete it from there.

28:52
Aryanna Brown: Oh, there it is.

28:55
Jayson Thorpe: There we go.

28:55
Aryanna Brown: There we go. There we go.

28:57
Jayson Thorpe: Now when we go to the Tab Container, perfect. There we go.

29:00
Aryanna Brown: Okay.

29:02
Jayson Thorpe: All right. Slight setback happens to the best of us. Now, let's go to our page configuration. We have all these different views, all of the different displays built, but not all of these are gonna appear in our session. This is where we manage which pages are accessible in our session, which pages are exposed via URL in our session, and what pages are navigable too. Here we're just taking our homepage, that forward slash root URL, pointing it to the overview view that we just built. As soon as we save our project and launch our session we'll see the fruits of our labor here. Here we see the large screen version where we can switch back and forth between alarms and history. And we're gonna use the developer tools in Chrome just to simulate a smaller screen here where we not only see the small view that we built with all of our motors, but can you go make that a little bit smaller again and show off that flex container doing its work.

30:03
Jayson Thorpe: Notice how when we're narrower, the Flex Container is scaling up and down for us. These are just a couple of options in Perspective to handle graceful layout scaling for different types of devices. And that does end our demonstration for today. We're about to take questions here, but we didn't even get a chance to look at, take a deep dive into that is of the reporting module, alarm notifications, things that not only get realtime data in front of people that need to see it, but also that historical data, things like reports, calculations, MES downtimes, but also getting that historical and aggregated data in front of those who need to see it as well. Thank you.

30:51
Aryanna Brown: That concludes our session. Thank you for coming.

31:01
Jayson Thorpe: And now we do have a microphone walking around the room if there are any questions. We have 15 minutes for questions, everyone. Yes. Right down here.

31:09
Audience Member 1: What's the difference between Vision...

31:10
Jayson Thorpe: Sorry. We will ask you to wait for the microphone because we are streaming or this will be... It's either being viewed live. It is.

31:19
Audience Member 1: What's the difference between Vision and Perspective?

31:22
Jayson Thorpe: Biggest difference is one, the Vision client's gonna run as a Java client in kind of the more client-host relationship. The biggest difference with Perspective is different screen sizes. You run Perspective session in a web browser, any device that can get online, access a web browser can run a Perspective session. This is not the case with Vision.

31:45
Aryanna Brown: They also run separately. Perspective runs on the gateway whereas Vision clients will run on the machine that they're launched from.

31:53
Jayson Thorpe: True. Any other questions? I know everyone's all hyped on 8.3...

32:00
Aryanna Brown: I know.

32:02
Jayson Thorpe: From that keynote. Yeah. In the back in the middle.

32:09
Audience Member 2: I saw on the 8.3 feature keynote, Rockwell and Siemens S7 I/O drivers. What are the other standard drivers that are included?

32:24
Jayson Thorpe: Let's go. Well, you know what? You can come talk to us after. I mean, we could show you on the Gateway right now. Actually, let's do that. Let's show you. Well, one of the things is different, the drivers that come standard on the gateway are for Siemens, Allen-Bradley, even Legacy versions of both of those different ones here we can see the drivers that just come standard on fresh out of the box install, but different vendors make different drivers as well. So there are very few devices that you're not able to connect to directly. But even if you can't, the fact that Ignition acts as an OPC server means that whatever OPC server you do have connected to those devices, Ignition's gonna still connect to that.

33:06
Audience Member 2: Very good. Thank you.

33:10
Audience Member 3: JT, I don't see a module for MQTT.

33:15
Jayson Thorpe: MQTT is a separate module. That one is available as a few different modules. We have the...

33:22
Aryanna Brown: Engine distributor and the broker. We also have the transmission. So if you are looking for those modules, you're definitely gonna have to go to a Cirrus Link. And they're technically a third party module, but we work very closely with them. So they won't be available to you on the actual Inductive Automation website, but we will help you support it.

33:44
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah.

33:46
Audience Member 4: How many active or consecutive sessions can you have? Is there a difference between Vision and Perspective? What's the payload? How heavy is it against the Gateway?

34:00
Aryanna Brown: So Vision, like I said earlier, that they're gonna be ran on the machines that they're launched from. So truthfully, if you have kind of a heavier project that's gonna be more intense, you have to make sure each machine that is launching that application for Vision can handle that. In Perspective though, it's in a web browser, so since it runs on the Gateway, if there are performance type issues, it's dependent on your gateway and the specs of the machine that your gateway is hosted on and what you gave your gateway. So truthfully, it's kind of endless. You can give it as many resources as you want, as long as your machine can handle it, go crazy.

34:40
Jayson Thorpe: The key is that the license, the Ignition license is never gonna limit you on how many databases you can connect to how many devices or OPC servers or how many concurrent runtimes of Vision or Perspective or designers. You can have as many going of all of those as you want in any combination. The license is never gonna restrict that for you. Yes, thank you.

35:02
Audience Member 5: If you're new to Ignition, where would you suggest you start to get in to get a good introduction and learn about the system?

35:09
Aryanna Brown: This is a great question.

35:11
Jayson Thorpe: We have... Well, sorry, you say I'll show.

35:14
Aryanna Brown: I'm glad you were going to it right away because I'm sure we were thinking the same thing. Inductive University, it is a great, great tool. New hires use it with us just to get them started. So I highly, highly recommend it to get you guys started as well.

35:33
Jayson Thorpe: So yeah, you can download it really quickly and get started with it really quickly and using this free library of video tutorials, you don't even have to log in to watch all of these, but if you log in, you can take challenges and build towards a credential here in the Inductive University. But essentially, this is almost a whole course on getting started with Ignition and being able to do some really cool stuff with it without even having to open the user manual or even attending a class. And all of this is for free, Inductive University. Yes. Down. Yeah. I see you.

36:02
Audience Member 6: Yeah. So you showed a toolbox earlier with like check boxes and then the carousel.

36:08
Jayson Thorpe: Oh. Yeah.

36:09
Audience Member 6: Can advanced users make their own, like software developers? Can they make their own controls and visualizations?

36:16
Aryanna Brown: Oh, like components?

36:17
Audience Member 6: Yes.

36:19
Aryanna Brown: I don't believe so.

36:22
Jayson Thorpe: And I've seen some pretty interesting things done with Java Swing, but that's like as a Java developer.

36:28
Aryanna Brown: I would think if you created your own module at that point you could do whatever with it. But I don't believe you can create your own components. We do allow, if you search through our forums and our community third party resources to allow to get in there and kind of modify what you can but not necessarily create components from scratch.

36:50
Jayson Thorpe: Those people that, some folks that do have that skillset to develop modules, if a lot of folks share those modules with each other on the Ignition Exchange, there's a lot of free user made resources here. And a lot of stuff that we've put out actually via Inductive Automation has put some stuff really cool modules on here. Anything from modules to project resources, a lot of that is done by other folks and the community is really great about sharing and caring.

37:21
Audience Member 6: Okay. Thank you.

37:22
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah, absolutely. And then, oh, over there and then this gentleman right here.

37:26
Audience Member 7: On the Inductive University, is there a way to monitor the process of people that you have assigned to go there to learn?

37:36
Jayson Thorpe: I think you can track this on your user portal through your organization portal. Yes. Cool. So that is trackable on your organization's portal.

37:47
Audience Member 8: I think users almost do.

37:48
Jayson Thorpe: Oh, okay. Cool. Thank you.

37:51
Audience Member 9: So, speaking of the Exchange, the project you guys just showed, is that on the Exchange for download, or we're gonna check out later?

37:58
Aryanna Brown: It is not.

38:00
Jayson Thorpe: No, but that's not a bad idea actually. Maybe we'll have to see if...

38:02
Audience Member 9: Maybe kind of study it, kind of get better understanding.

38:04
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah. That's not a bad idea. One thing you can do though, let's see, if we go and start a new project, if we went to go and create a new project right now, there are template projects included in the Gateway as well. So, you can just, for example, like Vision tab Nav, that's gonna create a project with some tab navigation already built in Vision, Perspective has similar ones. So you can actually just write a white out of the box installation, get some prebuilt resources to start playing around with some kind of like what we did here.

38:36
Audience Member 9: Brilliant. All right. Thank you.

38:38
Jayson Thorpe: You're very welcome. Oh, down here. Thank you.

38:46
Audience Member 10: So when you were showing the changing parameters and how easy that was, on a qualified system for like life sciences, is all of that audit trail, is everything on your audit trail that you make changes to just to ensure that once you're on a qualified system, anything that changes, you can go back and...

39:05
Aryanna Brown: Yes. So, we have an audit log. Now, not everything is logged in that audit log as of right now. But if you head to our manual page, it will list everything that is and you will at least be able to see who went into the project and how they changed it. If they changed the project, it will say like, project modification and who it was, it may not necessarily tell you exactly what it is they did. But anything that's more gateway scoped, it will tell you. So, if they wrote to a tag, if they modified a tag, if they actually modified the tag, it'll tell you that. Things that are more project resource-based, it doesn't, it's kind of hit or miss on what it will actually log right now.

39:46
Jayson Thorpe: The designer doesn't really track exact changes to like, in every individual component, but you will be able to see who logged in, who did save any changes. And even with scripting built in throughout and some extension functions or sorry, system functions people set up their own logging pretty effortlessly through the scripting that's already built into Ignition as as well.

40:06
Aryanna Brown: There's a scripting function to write to our audit log.

40:10
Jayson Thorpe: Exactly. So anything that that audit log doesn't cover, you can probably cook something up as well to make sure it does. Back there in the back.

40:19
Audience Member 11: Yeah. Is there a cross reference browser for your graphics and tags and everything?

40:22
Jayson Thorpe: A cross reference browser? I'm not sure what you mean by that.

40:26
Audience Member 11: Finding out where your templates are used.

40:29
Aryanna Brown: Oh, so like a find and replace type? Yeah, we do. We have a find and replace tool within the designer. And you can put in like a keyword of what you're looking for and it'll pop up and list everything that, whether it's a property binding, a component of you, a window name.

40:45
Jayson Thorpe: Script.

40:46
Aryanna Brown: Script as long as you kind of know a keyword, it'll try to find it within your project. So yes.

40:54
Jayson Thorpe: And that's one of those things that every couple versions there is something new to make managing the various moving pieces of your projects a lot easier. That's not necessarily new, but every couple versions there's something that lets you find things in your projects a little easier.

41:12
Aryanna Brown: Yes.

41:16
Audience Member 12: So with 8.3 coming out pretty soon beta, will there be videos posted on university that kind of goes over the new features to kind of get a start on learning that stuff? Like the drawing tools for instance?

41:27
Jayson Thorpe: Not right when it's released, but we absolutely are going to start you know, coming from the training department, we wanna be able to teach people. People are gonna wanna know how to use it. We want to teach people how to use it. We absolutely are gonna be building resources to learn Ignition 8.3 as soon as we can.

41:43
Aryanna Brown: It may not be immediately available, but.

41:44
Audience Member 12: Okay. That's fine. Will the docs be a good place to start to kind of see that stuff kind of comes...

41:49
Jayson Thorpe: Absolutely.

41:49
Audience Member 12: Through later on to just get that information as soon as possible?

41:52
Aryanna Brown: Absolutely. Yes.

41:52
Audience Member 12: Okay. Perfect. Thank you.

41:53
Aryanna Brown: Yes.

41:57
Jayson Thorpe: One more.

41:58
Audience Member 13: I saw that you had to log in when you launch each of the individuals, if you are tied to Active Directory LDAP, can you configure it so that it's gonna take the user who's logged into that machine?

42:10
Aryanna Brown: Oh, so that it automatically, yeah, like Windows authentication type thing? Yeah.

42:15
Jayson Thorpe: Indeed.

42:20
Aryanna Brown: Any other questions?

42:22
Jayson Thorpe: If you are raising... Oh, down here in front.

42:23
Aryanna Brown: Oh, all right.

42:27
Jayson Thorpe: We would like for the mic just so it's available in the recording.

42:31
Audience Member 14: You kind of touched on the driver support, but do you guys support OPC, all the flavors like DA, A&C Alarms and Events, all those different versions? And then on top of that bus protocols, like is there a means in which to get PROFIBUS, PROFINET, fieldbus? There was some talk earlier about HARP through a third party, but...

42:47
Aryanna Brown: I'm not entirely too sure, but I can find out for you if you come talk to me...

42:51
Audience Member 14: All right.

42:51
Aryanna Brown: After the session.

42:55
Jayson Thorpe: Start in the back.

42:56
Audience Member 15: My question's around managing users and role capabilities. Currently we have single sign-on integrated with Azure Active Directory, and the way to manage that is inside of Azure. We make a user a member of a group and that gives, is that the only way to assign privileges and access to inside Ignition? Or are there other ways?

43:21
Jayson Thorpe: So typically, when you do use a service like that, as an identity provider or I guess a user source, there's usually options for like a hybrid management where you, if the permissions allow, potentially make a change to the user in the gateway and then that would update the source of truth. That as an option for most config for most implementations of user sources like that. All right. If you're raising your hand, and we don't see you, wave it around, please. All right. Well, thank you so much everyone. We will be here if you wanna talk to us at all. Thank you. We won't keep you here anymore.

44:05
Aryanna Brown: Good job. Good job, dude.

44:06
Jayson Thorpe: Right back at you.