Ignition Module Tag Historization

Overview

When you enable history on an Ignition tag and set its History Provider to your Timebase historian instance, Ignition automatically routes that tag's data to Timebase. You do not need to write any scripts or configure the destination manually — history collection starts as soon as you enable it on the tag.

Enabling History on a Tag

1. In Ignition Designer, open the Tag Browser.
2. Right-click the tag and select Edit Tag.
3. On the History tab:
   • Set History Enabled to true.
   • Set History Provider to your Timebase historian instance name.
4. Save the tag.

Ignition begins collecting history immediately. New data points arrive in Timebase in near real time.

How Data Is Written

The module uses a four-phase write pipeline designed for high-throughput environments:

1. Aggregate — Incoming data points are grouped by dataset and tag name. Multiple points for the same tag are combined before processing.
2. Sort — Each tag's data points are sorted chronologically by timestamp.
3. Chunk — Tags are distributed across write chunks using a First-Fit Decreasing algorithm, which balances the chunks so no single chunk is significantly larger than others. A single tag's data is never split across chunks.
4. Parallel write — Chunks are written concurrently up to the Max Concurrent Writes limit. All write tasks are submitted immediately and the concurrency limit is enforced inside each task, so Ignition is never blocked while waiting for writes to complete.

Dataset Naming

Each Ignition Tag Provider maps to one Timebase dataset. The dataset name is:

<Historian Dataset Prefix><Tag Provider name>

Dataset names are sanitized automatically: whitespace is trimmed, spaces are collapsed, and characters that are not alphanumeric, spaces, hyphens, or underscores are replaced with underscores. If the dataset does not yet exist in Timebase, it is created automatically on the first write.

Supported Data Types

Quality Codes

Ignition quality codes are preserved as integers in Timebase:

Wire Format

Data is sent to Timebase as JSON:

{
  "Folder/TagName": [
    { "t": "2026-02-13T10:30:45.123Z", "v": 42.5, "q": 192 },
    { "t": "2026-02-13T10:30:46.456Z", "v": 43.2, "q": 192 }
  ]
}

• t — Timestamp in ISO 8601 UTC format (always Z suffix, millisecond precision)
• v — Value (omitted for null points)
• q — Quality code (integer)

Troubleshooting