OPC UA Configuration

OPC UA (Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture) is an industrial communication protocol for secure, reliable data exchange. Pulse connects to an OPC UA server as a data source and reads its values.

Adding an OPC UA Data Source

A data source holds everything about one server connection in one place: its address, how the channel is secured, how Pulse authenticates, and how often values are read.

1. Navigate to Data sources → OPC UA in the sidebar, which lists every OPC UA server Pulse reads, and click New data source
2. Select OPC UA
3. Configure the source:

Field	Description	Example
Name	A descriptive name for the source	Production Server 1
Connection	Endpoint URL, security mode and policy, authentication, and the server's pinned certificate — all configured together	opc.tcp://192.168.1.100:4840
Read interval (seconds)	How often every data point of this source is read	10
Acquire from this data source	Switch this off to stop polling without deleting the source
Tags	Categorize the source; every data point inherits its tags
Alert me when this source is unreachable	Creates a monitor alongside the source (see below)

Click Configure connection to open the connection panel, where the endpoint URL, security mode, security policy, authentication, and the pinned server certificate are set as one unit. The form then shows a summary of what you committed; Edit reopens the panel.

Security settings

The security mode, security policy, authentication, endpoint discovery, and both certificates involved in the connection are explained in depth in OPC UA Security. In short: use Sign & Encrypt with Basic256Sha256 or stronger in production, and let Discover endpoints pick the strongest configuration your server offers.

NETWORK REQUIREMENTS

Ensure your firewall allows TCP connections on the OPC UA port (default: 4840) between the Pulse server and your OPC UA servers.

Being Alerted When the Server Goes Down

Alert me when this source is unreachable is ticked when you add a source. It creates a condition monitor named after the source — Production Server 1 unreachable — that raises an incident once Pulse stops getting readings from it. Pick the escalation policy it should use in the field below the tick box.

From the moment it exists, it is an ordinary monitor: rename it, mute it, change its escalation policy, edit its condition, or delete it, all from the monitor list. Untick the box if nobody should be paged for this particular server.

Adding Data Points

The individual values on a server are data points of the source. The source's detail page lists every one Pulse reads, with its node ID, last value, last sample time, and reading quality.

To declare a new data point, open the source's detail page and choose Add data point from the actions menu. The dialog has two tabs:

• Browse — connects to the OPC UA server and shows its node tree. Expand nodes to find the values you want to read, tick one or more, and click Add. Nodes already declared on this source are marked and skipped.
• Type manually — enter the node's OPC UA identifier directly, e.g. ns=2;s=Temperature or ns=2;i=1001.

The data point's value type is filled in once the first reading arrives. Pulse starts polling the new node on the source's next cycle.

Alerting on a Value

To alert on a data point, build a condition and attach a condition monitor to it. A condition compares readings against thresholds, aggregates them over a time window, and can combine several of them — including a reading and its source's reachability in one rule, so an unplugged cable raises the one incident that says the cable is unplugged instead of one per value read through it.

The source's detail page shows a Monitors section listing every condition monitor that alerts on any data point of this source. Click a monitor to open its detail page. A source with no monitors alerts on nothing; that section says so explicitly — a useful reminder that readings are being collected but nobody is paged when they go wrong.

Each row in the data points table also shows which monitors alert on that specific node. A single monitor appears as an icon button that opens it directly; when two or more monitors alert on the same node, the button shows the count and opens a picker listing them by name.

Data points build up a history only while you keep them. Use Keep on the source's detail page for the values you want to chart and query over the long term; the rest stay readable for 24 hours.

OPC UA Alarms & Conditions

OPC UA Alarms & Conditions (A&C) is a standard mechanism for servers to push event and alarm notifications to clients. When an OPC UA data source receives an A&C event notification, Pulse automatically creates an incident for it.

Each incident created from an A&C event:

• Uses the alarm message from the OPC UA server as the incident title
• Displays the same alarm message in the incident detail view as the description, so the full alarm text is always visible in notifications and incident details

Incidents from A&C events are deduplicated: if the same condition triggers multiple times, only one open incident is created per condition.

Application instance certificate

To open a secure channel (Sign or Sign & Encrypt), Pulse presents an application instance certificate — a self-signed X.509 identity, one per organization, shared by every OPC UA data source. Each OPC UA server must trust this certificate before it will accept a secure connection.

Managing the certificate — downloading it, trusting it on your servers, and revoking it if compromised — is covered in OPC UA Security — Application instance certificate.

Rotation — replacing an expiring certificate

Because a replacement certificate is a new identity, Pulse rotates with an overlap window: a replacement is minted ahead of time, you trust it on every server while monitoring keeps running on the old one, then you complete the rotation. The full workflow is described in OPC UA Security — Rotation.