ABB Ability™ History is a time series database that is designed and optimised for industrial process information management and extensive history recording. High performance and reliability, together with maintenance-free operation, provide a solid platform for mission-critical systems.

ABB Ability™ History consists of independent but integrated software technology components that all together provide a platform to build products and systems for manufacturing process industries and utilities. ABB Ability™ History has built-in support for data acquisition from 3rd party data sources, such as control systems and devices, as well as input stream processing with alarm detection, automatic aggregation functions, and event-based delivery to the users of the data. ABB Ability™ History provides open interfaces for bidirectional data access and configurable data feed to 3rd party systems.

ABB Ability™ History supports redundancy for databases and services to build high-availability system configurations. Both Hierarchical System and Networked System structures are supported. The hierarchical system structure includes redundancy-supported data collector nodes (DCN) and the main history node for secure buffering of data acquisition.

Besides these functionalities, ABB Ability™ History includes engineering and application development tools. Engineering tools provide a web-based UI to configure, maintain, and monitor ABB Ability™ History itself as well as the applications. Application development tools include UI SDK to implement application dashboards for web and mobile use, calculation tools to implement the backend logic of the applications and tools to configure data exchange between systems. Server-side services provide hosting services for the runtime applications.

In short, ABB Ability™ History is a time-series database that provides interfaces, engineering tools, and extensive abilities to scale. ABB Ability™ History contains a relational database, RTDB, that is optimised for time-series data storing (TSDB), data acquisition and processing.

ABB Ability™ History Brochure & Video

HERE You can find the overview of ABB Ability™ History solution at 3 functional layers. A brief look at the whole package of ABB Ability™ History and its potential to serve as various solutions in different industrial contexts. Plus, a short promotional VIDEO to add to your presentation

Install ABB Ability™ History

To get started with ABB Ability™ History, it must be installed. You can find the latest builds of ABB Ability™ History from here. Note that the software repository is currently only accessible inside the ABB intranet.

ABB Ability™ History supports Windows and Linux environments. Installation guides can be found in the "Getting Started" category from the left-hand side menu. Alternatively, you can jump straight to the installation guide for Windows, Linux, or Docker. Installation guides will guide you through the installation process step-by-step.

Getting Started

When you have ABB Ability™ History installed, it is time to get started. We suggest you read through at least Technical overview, Architecture, and Concepts to understand key concepts of ABB Ability™ History. Also, we have prepared some tutorials that you might find helpful.

Help & Support

There are two contact channels for users of ABB Ability™ History to seek support from: the Microsoft Teams channel and the Support ticketing tool. However, we suggest using the search functionality and reading through the FAQ before contacting support.