OPC Router - Apache Kafka Streaming for OPC DA, OPC UA, PLC, DCS & More

Rapidly Integrating Your OT Assets with the Streaming Platform

Apache Kafka is a high-performance, highly scalable, open-source event streaming platform. Its distributed architecture scales through clusters to trillions of messages per day and is used by major global corporations.

For manufacturers that want to publish or subscribe to data in Kafka systems, OPC Router's Kafka-plug-in provides rapid, cost effective integration.  The large number of OPC Router connectors, including OPC, ERP, SAP databases, and web services to name a few, make it the perfect solution. 

• Publish data from any OPC Router connector to Kafka brokers
• Consumer of data by subscription from Kafka brokers to access data streams and share data with any supported OPC Router connector
• Broker topic browsing supported
• Drag & Drop configuration to get started fast
• Templatized Connections for Configuration Scalability including import of template instance configurations from Excel
• Works with commercial Kafka solutions like Confluent
• Licensed as plug-in on standard perpetual or subscription OPC Router licensing packages - the choice is yours 

Subscribing to Kafka Data with OPC Router

OPC Router can browse Kafka brokers to pick items to subscribe to, or enter them manually or build the connections using templates and import. 

Shown, here, a Kafka Trigger will fire whenever new messages arrive, and then OPC Router's JSON ETL object parses the payload into items, that are then, in this example mapped to a database insert as an example.

The results of the payload could also have been written to a PLC or controller by mapping the outputs to an OPC DA or UA client connection in OPC Router that is connected to your target OPC server. Many other action types are possible, with any connector that OPC Router supports.

Application Example: Distribution of Master Data Across Sites

In many processing, there are master data sets that are used for configuring systems to produce specific products. Rather than have all the systems query a central database, that may be at a different sites, it is beneficial to have a shadow copy at each site that is regularly updated.  This can result in faster setups, but more importantly insulate each site from any remote connection downtime. 

With Kafka, the central dataset can be published to a Kafka broker, and then each site consumes the data. The data moves in JSON packages that OPC Router can easily decode and parameterize and make available for us in production systems without a constant dependence on the central system. 

Production results can be sent back to the central sites with OPC Router building the JSON payload without programming, and publishing it to Kafka brokers.