Industrial plants are swimming in data, from historian records and detailed process data, to thousands of alarms that stream into control rooms every minute. This data tells us what happened, but it often fails to articulate the full story of how or why.
For decades, most Video Management System (VMS) platforms have started with cameras first and data second, treating process video as an afterthought, often “bolted onto” the control environment. But what if your VMS was designed from the beginning to be an extension of your control system? This is the core philosophy behind IVC’s Longwatch Video Historian.
The engineering lineage behind Longwatch traces back to the same group that helped develop the OPC standard, the foundational technology that allows control systems to share real-time process data across different platforms. This SCADA-first foundation means that native integration with process control systems, including OPC connectivity, historian data, alarms, and tags, was part of the original design philosophy. Longwatch connects directly to SCADA, DCS, and MES environments using standard industrial interfaces such as OPC and SQL, making video a seamless part of operational workflows.
A VMS Designed With Your Control System in Mind
When a VMS is designed to integrate with the SCADA environment, it fundamentally changes how operators and engineers interact with data. Longwatch ensures that video is synchronized with critical operational tag metadata, including alarms, events, batch IDs, and operator IDs. This synchronization transforms video into another reliable source of operational truth, sitting alongside trends and historian data, eliminating the need for operators to mentally stitch together two disparate systems.
This level of integration enables teams to view VMS and process data side by side. When an alarm occurs or a batch parameter drifts outside its limits, operators can see exactly what physically happened at that specific moment.
The Power of Context: Process Tag Driven Clipping
One of the most powerful capabilities that distinguishes Longwatch is its use of process control tags to drive VMS recording and retrieval. Unlike conventional platforms that rely solely on passive motion detection or manual bookmarks, Longwatch can natively use SCADA and process tags to automatically trigger, label, and organize video clips based on real operational context.
This capability means that clips are automatically associated with the same data points that operators use every day to run a plant. Clips can be automatically triggered and indexed based on a wide variety of specific process conditions, providing instant context upon retrieval:
- Alarm or event activation
- Batch ID or lot number
- Operator ID
- Line or area identifier
- Specific process conditions
- Type of activity or type of alarm
When an issue arises, retrieval is quick and efficient. Teams can search for and retrieve relevant data simply by using a batch number, an alarm type, or a specific operator activity.
This level of automatic association means that video clips are pre-tagged with critical operational information. This context is simply not achievable with conventional VMS solutions designed only for security.
Video as an Operational and Compliance Tool
By deeply linking video to process historian data and alarms, Longwatch extends the utility of video far beyond simple surveillance. The Video Historian makes video an essential tool for operations, troubleshooting, training, and compliance. The platform supplements control system data with intuitive, quickly accessed video, providing a new dimension of understanding where raw process data alone falls short.
Enhancing Troubleshooting and Reducing Downtime
Video Historian significantly accelerates troubleshooting efforts. When an alarm fires, the built-in mapping of video to alarm messages automatically displays the video captured before, during, and after the alarm. Operators can immediately click on an alarm, batch, or trend to view the relevant clips tied to that data point, eliminating the need to scrub through hours of footage. This capability helps teams to pinpoint the root cause of process upsets much faster, reducing downtime and eliminating costly, unnecessary field investigations. Managers and operators receive timely, additional visual information to make better decisions that save time, money, and effort.
Improving Training and Compliance
Longwatch helps to document operations for regulatory and quality compliance and supports record-keeping purposes by providing video documentation of various steps in the process.
The integration also dramatically improves operator training using Longwatch’s Console Recorder module. New personnel can be trained using real process examples captured during actual operational events. Video clips can also be post-view tagged by operators with comments or defined tags to organize video collections for easier future reference or for creating training modules.
Additionally, the system supports proactive and preventive maintenance by allowing visual confirmation of equipment status and processes.
Built for the Industrial Environment
Longwatch’s architecture is specifically designed to meet the demands of large, distributed industrial systems. The system features a two-tiered structure: the Video Control Center (VCC) serves as the central portal for configuration, live viewing, and playback, while remote video engines handle edge recording. This design allows for distributed recording, flexible bandwidth management, and secure remote access.
For accessibility and integration, Longwatch supports a variety of open formats and interfaces.
A Solution That Works with Your Process Data
Plants generate enormous amounts of data daily, yet trends and historical records only tell part of the story, often failing to show what physically occurred on the plant floor. Longwatch fills this critical gap by treating video as process data. Because the platform was created by a team with a deep understanding of SCADA at its core, it ties video directly to process data in a way that feels completely natural to operators and engineers.
The result is a comprehensive data and archiving system that allows operators to seamlessly locate past events, while still monitoring the rest of the system. For industrial operations where context, accuracy, and speed are the measures of success, this difference is significant.
If you are still relying on traditional management systems designed primarily for security surveillance, you may remain disconnected from the data that runs your plant. Longwatch bridges that gap. We help teams understand not just what the data says, but what actually happened in your process.
Talk to an IVC Sales Engineer about your SCADA environment.
Jarred Melendez is a senior channel sales director at Industrial Video & Control and has been with the company since 2015. To get in touch with Jarred directly, email him at jmelendez@ivcco.com.