New features for Paessler PRTG OPC UA Server

We released Paessler PRTG OPC UA Server earlier this year, and since then we’ve been hard at work improving and updating it to make it even better. With a new release of PRTG OPC UA Server out now, we thought this is the perfect time to get you caught up on the changes we’ve made, and their benefits to you.

What is Paessler PRTG OPC UA Server?

Operational technology (OT) infrastructure relies on network elements like routers, switches, firewalls, and much more. Two main issues result from this dependency:

• OT network components are often managed separately from OT devices and systems, usually by an IT team.
• Network devices often lack compatibility with the standard protocols commonly utilized in OT.

Because of this, OT teams lack visibility of the underlying network infrastructure in their SCADA and other supervisory and control systems.

Paessler PRTG OPC UA Server serves as a vital link, bridging the gap between the network components and the supervisory and control systems. To understand more about PRTG OPC UA Server and how it works together with Paessler PRTG monitoring software, refer to Announcing PRTG OPC UA Server.

What’s new for PRTG OPC UA Server?

Here are a few new features and functions of PRTG OPC UA Server that we've added over the past months.

Sensor Status Summary

PRTG OPC UA Server data now includes a sensor status summary group, which shows you how many sensors are in each status.

This is useful if you only need to know when sensors have a specific status.

For users of the Advanced and Professional versions of PRTG OPC UA Server, we’ve also added the possibility to navigate to sensors that are in the “Warning” or “Down” status from the sensor summary:

This means that you don’t have to monitor specific devices in your supervisory and control system, but can rather focus only on specific statuses. When sensors are in a  warning or down status, you can drill down to find the problem device. In other words: you get an alarm when sensors are in a certain status, and then you can retrieve data about exactly which devices are involved.

Tag status summary

Similar to the sensor status summary, it is possible to see the status of sensors grouped by specific tags. This is helpful if you want to monitor the status of certain devices or components that belong to one concept or monitoring overview. An example of this is sensors related to a certain production line: let's say you want to easily see if sensors monitoring devices in the production line are in a warning or down status, and if so, which ones. If you use the same tag for all the sensors associated to the same production line, they will be included in the tag status summary in your supervisory system. This way, you can easily check the warning and down status summaries for these sensor tags to find issues. You can also drill down to get information about exactly which devices are problematic (just like with the sensor status summary above). The tag status summary is available to users of the Professional version of PRTG OPC UA Server.

Mass import of monitoring data into SCADA

PRTG OPC UA Server now provides functionality for you to export a list of all the objects that are available in PRTG OPC UA Server as a CSV file. This makes setting up of the monitoring metrics in your supervisory and control system easier. This feature is available for the Professional version of PRTG OPC UA Server.

Improved OPC UA certificate handling

OPC UA certificate handling has been improved and there is now full support of the Windows Certificate store in PRTG OPC UA Server. During the installation process a new certificate is created and stored persistently in the Windows Certificate store. This also makes it easier for administrators to change the certificate if required.

Other new features

Of course, this is not all the new functionality that we have added since launch. Here is a list of other features that are now in PRTG OPC UA Server:

• Replicate PRTG tree in PRTG OPC UA Server
• Ability to move sensor channels to an OPC UA subfolder
• UTF-8 with BOM and UTF-16 encoding for configuration files
• Support for TLS 1.3 for PRTG Application Server to PRTG OPC UA Server connection
• Paessler PRTG OPC UA Server Quick Start Guide as installation option

And of course, the updates to OPC UA Server have included other fixes and improvements as well.

Features and pricing list

Here is a list of the features available for the Basic, Advanced and Professional versions of PRTG OPC UA Server, as well as pricing: 

If you want to test PRTG OPC UA Server to find out if it's right for your industrial infrastructure, you can request a trial and benefit from a free set-up session with one of our monitoring experts. Get in touch and request a trial here.

And of course, as always, you can ask your questions in the comments below!