Forward Historian¶

The primary use case for the Forward Historian is to send data to another instance of VOLTTRON as if the data were live. This allows agents running on a more secure and/or more powerful machine to run analysis on data being collected on a potentially less secure/powerful board.

Given this use case, it is not optimized for batching large amounts of data when “live-ness” is not needed. For this use case, please see the Data Mover Historian.

The Forward Historian can be found in the services/core directory.

Configuration¶

The default configuration file is services/core/ForwardHistorian/config. Change the destination-vip value to point towards the foreign VOLTTRON instance.

{
    "agentid": "forwarder",
    "destination-vip": "ipc://@/home/volttron/.volttron/run/vip.socket"
}

In order to send to a remote platform, you will need its VIP address and server key. The server key can be found by running:

vctl auth serverkey

Put the result into the following example:

Note

The example shown uses the local IP address, the IP address for your configuration should match the intended target

{
    "agentid": "forwarder",
    "destination-vip": "tcp://127.0.0.1:22916",
    "destination-serverkey": "<SOME_KEY>"
}

Adding the configuration option below will limit the backup cache to n gigabytes. This will help keep a hard drive from filling up if the agent is disconnected from its target for a long time.

"backup_storage_limit_gb": n