A Historian is a type of software that records process data over time, storing each value along with its corresponding timestamp. In industrial automation, historians serve as the long-term memory of control systems—tracking key variables like pressures, temperatures, or equipment states for later analysis, reporting, and visualization.

Software Suppliers

Industrial historians are often built as proprietary systems tailored to a specific vendor’s ecosystem. However, general-purpose time series databases have become increasingly popular for their flexibility, scalability, and integration capabilities across diverse data sources.

Industrial Historians

• Inductive Automation Ignition Historian
• Allen-Bradley FactoryTalk Historian (Powered by AVEVA PI)
• AVEVA PI System
• AVEVA Historian
• GE Proficy Historian

Time Series Databases

• TimescaleDB (PostgreSQL add-on)
• InfluxDB

Joyful Thoughts

This section shares James Joy’s perspective on this technology as it applies to industrial automation.

A Historian is arguably one of the most essential components in a SCADA or MES environment. It’s the silent foundation that underpins process optimization, compliance, and operational insight. Without a reliable historian, even the best automation systems operate without true context—like flying blind without flight data.

The greatest risk with any historian is data loss. Most vendors frame this as a matter of server redundancy or failover strategy, but in reality, the most common cause is misconfiguration—not collecting the right tags, or assuming certain metrics won’t matter until they suddenly do.

We address this in Mantle by automatically historizing every Sparkplug B metric it discovers on the MQTT broker. It’s far less risky to log everything by default and later refine or compress the dataset, than to lose critical insight forever because someone forgot to check a “record history” box.