Tags
A tag is one measured thing over time. The temperature of an oven. The speed of a printing press. The counter of a filling line. Every value that flows into UpBlue belongs to a tag, stored in the UpBlue Historian: a time-series database built to handle millions of machine datapoints per day.
Tags are the building blocks of the platform: dashboards show tags, alert rules watch tags and operations are stored in tags.
There are two types of tags:
- Timeserie — normal measurement data: a value with a timestamp. Temperature, speed, energy, counters.
- Event — periods with a start and an end: production runs, downtime, batches. See Operations.
The Tags page
Open your organisation and go to the Tags page. Here you find every tag in the organisation with its labels, when it was last seen and how many datapoints it contains.
Use the search field to find a tag by name, or filter on labels, for example everything with Cell = Line1. Read more about labels.
Where is this tag used?
The “Used in” column shows in how many connection rules a tag is used. Click it to see the exact rules, and jump straight to the rule. Use this before changing or deleting a tag: you see exactly what depends on it.
Tag details
Click a tag to open it. The detail page shows:
- Tag information: last seen, number of datapoints, created date
- A chart of the tag over a selectable time range
- The raw datapoints, so you can check exactly what was received
This is the fastest way to answer the question “is my machine data coming in?”. Create your connection rule, then watch the tag page.
Creating and renaming tags
Most tags are created automatically by connection rules. You can also create a tag by hand with Create tag, for example to prepare a tag before building a dashboard, or as target for a data import.
Renaming a tag renames it everywhere: dashboards and rules keep working, and the history stays with the tag.
Exception: tags that are created automatically from incoming data, for example an MQTT rule that extracts the tag name from the topic. Such a tag is matched by its name. If you rename it, the incoming data creates a new tag with the old name and the history is split over two tags. The rename dialog warns you when this is the case.
Downloading tag data
The export uses the VictoriaMetrics JSON format. The same format can be imported again with Data Import, for example to move data to another organisation.
Deleting a tag deletes its data. A tag that is still used in rules cannot be deleted — remove it from the rules first. To delete many tags or datapoints at once, use Data Management.