What Is MES?

Simply put, a MES system is used to monitor and manage work-in-process on the factory floor, covering resource scheduling, production workflows, recipe management, traceability, inventory, quality assurance, document control, and more. A successful implementation of MES software will not only improve efficiency, but make manufacturers into better businesses.

NERC CIP Best Practices with Inductive Automation and Ignition

This guide addresses best practices for using Ignition and working with software vendors in a CIP-compliant way, with recommendations based on specific CIP standards.

Using Keycloak with Ignition

Keycloak is an open-source Identity and Access Management solution for adding authentication to applications or services. With Ignition, Keycloak functions as an Identity Provider to authenticate users and define roles to access client/session views.

What Is a Panel PC?

Most people are familiar with PCs (Personal Computers), but far fewer understand the difference between a retail PC and a panel PC. Whereas PCs are typically found in offices, panel PCs are specialized units designed to be used on or near machines in industrial environments like plant floors or remote sites. Panel PCs are built specifically to run HMI/SCADA software that allows operators to monitor and control processes in virtually every industry, including food & beverage, oil & gas, automotive, water & wastewater, and many more.

21 CFR Part 11 and Pharmaceutical Best Practices with Ignition

This guide addresses Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 21 CFR Part 11, Data Integrity and Good Automated Manufacturing Practices (GAMP). It provides best practices and guidelines supporting regulated Ignition applications in the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries.

Ignition Server Sizing and Architecture Guide

This guide is intended to provide some tips to help you determine the correct architecture depending on your requirements. It is important to note that any architecture that you come up with needs to be fully tested and verified. Throughout that process you can observe the performance characteristics of the server in order to make any necessary adjustments to the architecture. There is no guarantee on performance since it is based on your design choices.

Ignition 8 Deployment Best Practices

Inductive Automation provides this helpful guide for deploying Ignition applications. The guide offers Ignition 8 best practices for setting up development and testing workflow.

PLC: Programmable Logic Controller

Learn Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) basics: what it is, what its functions are, how it operates, and its importance in the world of automation.

Let's Encrypt Guide for Ignition

Ignition 8.0.3 introduces support for hot-reloading the Gateway’s SSL keystore. This capability enables Ignition to play well with services such as Let’s Encrypt which provide for automatic SSL certificate management. This article walks through one example for integrating Ignition with Let’s Encrypt.

Inductive Automation Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)

This document outlines information on Ignition versioning, release schedule, security/vulnerability fixes, and an overview of our Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) including Quality Assurance (QA) processes.

What Is A System Integrator?

Whether you call them “control system integrators,” “systems integrators,” “system integrators,” or just “integrators,” these technology professionals combine different hardware, software, and communication protocols to create an automation system for their customers, and they are becoming increasingly important with the rising adoption of new automation technologies.

What Is Edge Computing?

Edge computing means moving computation and data storage capabilities closer to the source of data. Narrowing the distance between data generation and collection can reduce latency, bandwidth usage, and overall cost for the enterprise.

Hosted/Multi-tenant Ignition Cloud Edition Guidance

Inductive Automation is proud to permit the licensing use of hosted and multi-tenant applications at no additional cost to the licensee when using Ignition Cloud Edition. Hosting enables flexible resource sharing and “pay as you go” service models. Multi-tenancy can enable the broad delivery of custom Ignition applications as a service. This change enables new service provider roles with the potential to benefit the greater Ignition community. However, these models inherently introduce risk to stakeholders.

Choosing the Best SCADA Software: 6 Important Features

Discover how to choose the best Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) software, with the six features you need and how to choose the right vendor.

New to Ignition? Learn the Lingo With This Glossary.

When you're a newcomer to the world of Ignition, it’s exciting to learn about all of the things you can do with it, but there are also some challenges. One of the challenging things is learning the various terms and acronyms associated with Ignition and with industrial automation in general. To help with that, we've put together this glossary of some of the most common terms that you'll hear. Along with a short definition, each term includes a link to further information. We hope this helps jumpstart your Ignition journey.

Ignition Security Hardening Guide

Included in this document are guidelines specifically for the Ignition software, as well as general suggestions regarding the hardware and network where Ignition is installed. The steps provided are recommendations rather than requirements and should be reviewed for relevance in each implementation.

Checklist: Avoid Visualization, Alarming & Security Mistakes

No matter how much experience we have, we all make mistakes sometimes. Fortunately, Ignition gives you the tools to not only fix those mistakes, but turn them into strengths when you’re developing projects in the future. Below, we’ve compiled a checklist of common mistakes and corresponding solutions to review before you start building so you can get your projects developed quickly and running as efficiently and securely as possible.

Checklist: Avoid Common Project Mistakes in Data Collection, HMI Design & Scripting

It’s easy to make mistakes. We’ve all done it! Sometimes we complete a task in an inefficient or overly complex way. Other times we only discover a mistake after the fateful copy/paste that breaks an entire screen. Luckily, with Ignition it’s just as easy to fix mistakes and in the process create reusable assets that save development time. Below, we’ve compiled a checklist to help you avoid common mistakes and make your project as efficient as possible.

Ignition Historian

Ignition historian functionality is a robust set of features built into Ignition modules, providing data acquisition, storage, retrieval, and visualization. As with everything else in Ignition, its SCADA historian functionality is modular, and this document covers the modules for those features.

Technical Pathways Program Map

The Inductive Automation Technical Pathways Program supports career development for individuals who join the company as Software Technical Analyst and puts them on a path to more advanced positions in the company. Above is the map of who Inductive Automation employees can move through the program.

Perspective Planning Checklist

To get the best out of your Perspective project, we developed this project checklist for you to use. While you can easily build your project in Perspective right out of the box, having a plan of attack will enable you to use Perspective in its full capacity. We recommend that you follow this checklist prior to your build to help jumpstart your project.

SCADA: Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition

A quick breakdown of what supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) is, who uses it, its history, and an overview of modern SCADA systems.

HMI: Human-Machine Interface

A Human-Machine Interface (HMI) is a user interface or dashboard that connects a person to a machine, system, or device. While the term can technically be applied to any screen that allows a user to interact with a device, HMI is most commonly used in the context of an industrial process.

MQTT: The Leading Messaging Protocol for IIoT

Discover the basics of MQTT (once known as Message Queuing Telemetry Transport): What it does, what its advantages are, why it was created, how it works, and who uses it.

IIOT: Industrial Internet Of Things

IIoT promises to revolutionize manufacturing by enabling the acquisition and accessibility of far greater amounts of data, at far greater speeds.