Can a Systemlink server become client for other Systemlink server?

[ThamS]

Hello dear,

the case is

If we are going to monitor several plants. On each plant there will be several DAQ station distributed.

We know each DAQ station could become client for it related plant local server.

However, if we need a central server, can the plant servers, (as additional as server for the each local plant) also become clients for the central server?

or is there any better architecture idea?

the purpose of central server is to visualize measurement data from all plants in one dashboard.

[CFEARING01]

Good Question @ThamS,

We have a similar use case at our company where we want servers local to geographical areas since we have facilities at multiple locations in the US, however, we also would like a central server or at least a method to keep the package repository synced and identical between all servers.

This is an interesting concept though. Look forward to hearing a response from NI.

[MarkBlack]

Thank you both for these questions. This general topic of multiple servers working together has come up a lot recently, and it's an area of interest for us. 

@ThamS, From what I understand you would like multiple SystemLink servers sending their data to a central SystemLink server where everything can be viewed at once. We do have some capability like this when using SystemLink + SystemLink Cloud together using the Cloud Connector. This is only for tags and messages now, but I'd like to know if this is generally the type of capability you are looking for (the more you can share the better). We are interested in bringing this capability to SystemLink server in case you cannot use our Cloud product. 

@Chase

Do I understand correctly that you are interested in this centralized data view concept as well as synchronizing packages and feeds? Just trying to get more data points on what people are interested in. We do have some capability with keeping package repositories in sync using the Feed Replication capability in the Package Repository. You can give a leaf server the URL of a feed hosted on a central server. This effect is one way though - packages added to the feed on the central server will become available to the leaf server, but the leaf server cannot add packages to the same feed. We are considering removing this limitation and allowing package replication in both directions. 

I'm curious if there are other parts of SystemLink you believe would benefit from being setup central+leaf servers pattern? Any thoughts on test results, alarms, user roles, dashboards, etc?

[ThamS]

Yeah, But, for proprietary reason the system owner prefer to avoid cloud.

[MarkBlack]

Is the concern where its hosted; e.g. on-premises versus AWS, Azure, GCP etc?  Or is the concern software as a services where NI (rather than you) host, operate, and maintain the server?