Executive summary
Panorama H2 is CODRA’s Historian offer for collecting, archiving and analysing operational data locally or in a hosted model. A useful industrial Historian does more than retain values. It preserves trustworthy timestamps and enough operating context to explain what equipment, alarms, teams and production conditions were involved.
The central question is not “How much data can we store?” It is “Can operators and engineers retrieve dependable evidence quickly enough to understand events, compare performance and improve decisions?”
See CODRA’s official Panorama H2 – Data Historian & Reporting page and its guide to Data Historian: Data Archiving & Time-Series Analysis.
A Historian is an operational evidence layer
Operational information arrives from PLCs, DCSs, RTUs, meters, machines, building systems, instruments, third-party software and manual inputs. The Historian must preserve chronology while making relationships visible: a process value before an alarm, a change of operating phase, the equipment in service, the team on shift and the time taken to acknowledge or correct an event.
This context distinguishes an operational Historian from a generic archive. It supports post-event analysis, performance comparison, compliance evidence, maintenance investigation and the data preparation needed for more advanced analytics.
Data quality and governance come before dashboards
- Timestamp integrity: define source timestamps, time zones, clock synchronisation and store-and-forward behaviour.
- Context: preserve asset, site, unit, batch, operating phase and alarm relationships.
- Quality flags: distinguish measured, calculated, substituted, stale and unavailable values.
- Retention: align raw and aggregated histories with operational, regulatory and cost requirements.
- Ownership: define who may create tags, alter calculations, approve reports and export data.
A fast database cannot compensate for inconsistent naming, missing instrumentation or unclear responsibility. Those foundations should be included in the first pilot.
One history serving several operational applications
A shared Historian can provide context to SCADA, GeoSCADA, BMS, EMS, PSIM and MES applications without turning them into one undifferentiated system. Operators retain purpose-built interfaces while authorised teams gain consistent historical evidence.
Operations
Event reconstruction and trend analysis
Compare values, alarms, acknowledgements and operating phases to investigate incidents and recurring losses.
Published customer evidence
These CODRA customer references document specific deployments. Figures and project status refer to the cited publication. International examples illustrate technical scope; the country shown identifies where the project took place.
Hager · France · 2025
At Obernai, Panorama Data Historian supports energy monitoring across ten buildings, with 600 power meters identified in the 2025 account. Teams create and share reports without writing SQL. Hager reports 14 working hours saved each week and energy-report preparation reduced from two days to one hour. These are customer-specific reported outcomes, not a guaranteed saving for another project.
Read the CODRA customer reference (PDF) · EN
CFAO Green Infra · Côte d’Ivoire · 2026
CFAO Green Infra uses Panorama Edge-to-Service and H2.Cloud for energy monitoring coordinated from Abidjan. The published account records 11 sites installed out of 30, local supervision, central administration and Store & Forward to preserve data during network outages. Site managers receive reports and alerts on energy and environmental conditions. The 30% consumption reduction is a target; extension to Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Cameroon is described as a progressive programme, not evidence of completed deployment in all three countries.
Read the CODRA customer reference (PDF) · FR
For a project in Africa, discuss the existing systems, interfaces, site autonomy and support responsibilities with Nicolas Hamel · CODRA.
Evaluate Panorama for your project
For a Historian, define acquisition rates, retention, timestamps, quality flags and expected query loads. Demonstrate recovery of buffered records and retrieval of a representative incident. Size and validate storage and performance against the project workload rather than a generic tag-count comparison.
To prepare the enquiry, collect system versions, available interfaces and point lists, required functions and operating constraints. Agree a demonstration scenario and acceptance criteria with the users. See the common selection and acceptance criteria.
What evidence should you request?
Official documentation describes product capabilities. A demonstration verifies the project interfaces and operating scenario. For comparable customer evidence, request a documented scope and an authorised reference discussion where available. Examples in this guide are evaluation scenarios unless explicitly identified as customer references.
Product and partner sources: Panorama Edge-to-Service · Panorama COM · CODRA partner network.
Contact Nicolas Hamel at CODRA with the country, sites, existing systems and the first operating decision you want to improve.
What information should I prepare for a Panorama enquiry?
Prepare the countries and sites, system versions, available interfaces and points, required functions and operating constraints. Nicolas Hamel coordinates qualification with CODRA and the appropriate integration route.
Performance
Cross-site and cross-period comparison
Normalise context so utilities, buildings, production lines or remote assets can be compared on defensible definitions.
Local, central and multi-site Historian architecture
Remote and critical sites may need to continue collecting data when the WAN is unavailable. A distributed design can retain local acquisition and buffering while transferring selected history to a central service for group analysis. The project should define recovery order, duplicate handling, bandwidth limits, time synchronisation and the authority of central commands separately from data collection.
Panorama Edge-to-Service provides a reference pattern for local autonomy, central administration and controlled data transfer. See Panorama Edge-to-Service.
From historical data to earlier anomaly detection
Automatic Fault Detection (AFD) uses historical operating data to learn normal behaviour across different phases and flag abnormal patterns. The useful output is not an unexplained score; it is an alert that an engineer or operator can investigate with the underlying trends and context.
AFD does not repair poor sensors, missing context or inconsistent operating procedures. Its effectiveness depends on the Historian foundation and the organisation’s ability to review and act on findings. See AFD: detect the abnormal before it becomes an incident.
How to evaluate an industrial Historian project
- Choose representative decisions: incident analysis, energy comparison, maintenance investigation or production performance.
- Inventory sources and rates: tag volumes, changes, bursts, events, alarms, manual data and existing archives.
- Define context and quality: timestamps, asset hierarchy, calculations, quality flags and naming.
- Model retention and recovery: raw versus aggregated data, backup, restoration and disconnected operation.
- Test retrieval: prove that users can answer real questions within an acceptable time, not only that ingestion works.
Delivery across Africa’s four regions
CODRA’s Africa business and technical office in Johannesburg is the direct route for African projects and coordinates suitable certified integrators according to the country. Felton Energy Services represents CODRA in Nigeria only; ZEK Group International represents CODRA in Tanzania only.
See the dedicated pages for Vendor-independent Unified Control Centres for West Africa, Vendor-independent Unified Control Centres for Central Africa, Vendor-independent Unified Control Centres for East Africa and Vendor-independent Unified Control Centres for Southern Africa.
Frequently asked questions
How is an industrial Historian different from a normal database?
An industrial Historian is designed around time-series acquisition, timestamps, quality, operational context and efficient retrieval of changing process data. A general database may still be used elsewhere in the architecture.
Can Panorama H2 collect data from an existing SCADA or BMS?
Yes, subject to the available interfaces and project design. The source protocols, data semantics, timestamps and ownership should be validated before migration or federation.
Does an industrial Historian have to be in the cloud?
No. CODRA describes Panorama H2 as available locally or in a hosted model. The correct choice depends on autonomy, cybersecurity, connectivity, governance and lifecycle requirements.
Can historical data support predictive maintenance?
Yes. Historical trends and anomaly detection can support earlier diagnosis and predictive-maintenance workflows, but outcomes depend on instrumentation, context, data quality and maintenance processes.
What should a Historian pilot prove?
It should prove reliable acquisition, timestamp and quality handling, recovery after disconnection, usable context, retrieval performance and at least one decision or report that users can validate.
Next step
Evaluate the application against your real installed base
I work with operators and local integrators to define the initial scope, interfaces, cybersecurity requirements and delivery model.