Explanation · for Operators, Engineers, Administrators
A tour of the hub
What you see after you sign in to the Proxus hub, and what each menu group and main screen is for.
The hub is the web application you sign in to. Everything you set up in Proxus, and most of what you watch, is here. This page walks through the screen and the menu, so you know where things are before you start.
The screen
- The menu on the left holds every screen, in seven groups. The Filter... box at its top finds a screen by name. The icon at the top left of the header hides and shows the menu.
- Tabs. Each screen you open gets a tab, so you can keep a device, a trend and a rule open side by side and switch between them. Close a tab with its ×.
- The work area shows the screen of the active tab.
- The header icons, from left to right: AI Assistant, the assistant that answers questions about your plant (also Ctrl+K, see the AI Assistant), Support, Guided tour, your user menu and Settings. Support opens a new support request in the Proxus portal with this installation's License ID and version filled in. The user menu holds My Details, where you change a Proxus password, and Log Off (see Sign in). In Settings you choose the language of the interface.
Guided tours
The first time you sign in, a short tour walks you through the hub: the menu, the AI Assistant and where to find help. It shows only what your role lets you see. Close it at any time; it does not start by itself again.
Guided tour in the header opens the learning center:
- This screen: the tour of the screen you are on. Operations Center, Trend Workspace, Topology, UNS Explorer, Devices, Forms, Apps, Dashboards, Reports and Certificate Store have one, and so does an open dashboard, device, Edge Gateway, pipeline, alarm rule, function, role or user. The tour of an open dashboard shows how its items filter each other, the export, parameters and full screen, how often it refreshes and where to change it. On a screen with no records yet, the tour shows what is there, or says to add the first record and open it again. On a narrow screen, where the toolbar folds a button into its ... menu, the step points at that menu and says the button is in it. A step about a button that adds or changes records, such as New or Switch to Design Mode, is left out when your role cannot use that button.
- Get to know Proxus: the welcome tour and a tour of the menu, group by group. A tick shows the ones you have seen.
- First jobs: connect your first machine, set up your first alarm and build your first dashboard, each in a few steps. Proxus ticks a step when it sees it done, from your own data. A job your role cannot finish, such as setting up an alarm for a read-only user, is not listed.
Show me next to a step teaches it by doing. The tour opens the right screen, opening its menu group if needed, then points at the button to use, such as New. Once you select it, the page is yours to work on and the tour waits in the corner. When Proxus sees the step done, for example the new rule action saved, the tour says so and offers the next step. Later closes it; the step stays in the learning center. An empty list that is the place of such a step, such as Devices or Rule Actions, offers the same tour with Show me how.
The last step of each tour offers the next one: a screen's tour leads to the welcome tour, and the welcome tour to the menu tour. Use the arrow keys to move between steps and Esc to close. On a phone, a tour that shows the menu opens it for you and closes it again at the end. A screen tour leaves the page scrolled where it was.
Every wizard (adding a device, importing devices, Kepware, OPC UA, installing an edge gateway) has a ? at the top right of its step: it shows how the wizard works, over the wizard itself.
Ask the AI Assistant how to do something, for example "How do I set up an alarm rule? Show me.", and its answer starts with a button for the tour that teaches it. The tour starts only when you select the button.
After an update that changes how you work, a short What's new tour shows the changes once, the first time you sign in. Someone new gets the welcome tour instead.
Learning statistics
Platform > Learning Statistics shows administrators how the tours are used: how many were taken, how many were followed to the end, how many people reached each step and where a tour was most often closed, for the last 30, 90 or 365 days. It also shows how far the first jobs are for the whole plant. Tours are counted without names and kept for a year.
Lists in the hub work the same way everywhere: New adds an entry, a click opens it, and the toolbar of an open entry has Save, Delete, Refresh and the Audit Trail of its changes.
The menu
The groups follow the order of the work: watch the plant, connect machines, organize their data, automate reactions, analyze the history, control access and certificates, and run the platform. What you see depends on your role; an administrator sees every group.
Monitor: what is happening now
| Screen | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Operations Center | The start screen: whether everything is within limits, what needs attention, every site and device at a glance, and how data moves through the platform. |
| Trend Workspace | Draw the values of any tags over time, compare periods, and see machine state, alarms and changes on the same axis. |
| Topology | A map of the sites, gateways, hub and outbound targets, with their live health. |
| Alerts | Every alarm that rules and pipelines have raised, to acknowledge and follow up. |
| AI Assistant | Ask questions about the plant in plain language; the answers come from live data, with your permissions. |
Read more in Monitor.
Connect: bring machines in, send data out
| Screen | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Devices | One entry per machine, PLC, robot or sensor that Proxus reads. |
| Device Profiles | How to talk to a kind of device: protocol, connection settings and tags. |
| Edge Gateways | The runtimes that read devices. The hub's own is called SYSTEM. |
| Notification Channels | Ways to reach people: email, SMS, chat services. |
| Outbound Targets | Databases, brokers and cloud services that receive copies of the data. |
| Import Devices | Add many devices at once from a spreadsheet. |
| Kepware Project Importer | Bring devices and tags over from a Kepware project. |
Read more in Connect.
Organize: give the data a structure
| Screen | What it is for |
|---|---|
| UNS Explorer | The Unified Namespace as a live tree: enterprise, site, area, device, tag. |
| Health Checks | Findings about how the platform is set up, a map of how its parts depend on each other, and a trace of where a value goes. |
| Application Templates | Ready-made applications you can install into the hub. |
Read more in Organize.
Automate: react to the data
| Screen | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Pipelines | Clean, convert, enrich and route values, or react to them, from a goal in plain sentences or on a canvas. |
| Functions | Your own C# code, run on the gateways you choose. |
| Rules | Conditions on values or logs that raise alarms and start actions. |
| Rule Actions | What a rule does when it fires: notify people or trigger an outbound target. |
Read more in Automate and, for the choice between them, Pipelines, rules and functions.
Analyze: look back
| Screen | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Dashboards | Charts and figures built on the historian and the configuration. |
| Reports | Printable reports, built in or designed by you. |
| Scheduled Deliveries | Send reports by email on a schedule. |
| Reporting Federation | The connection that lets reports and dashboards combine values from the historian with device and alarm data. |
Read more in Analyze.
Security: who may sign in, and the certificates
| Screen | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Users and Roles | Who may sign in, and what each role may see and change. |
| Certificate Store | The platform's certificate authority and every certificate the hub, the gateways, OPC UA connections and outbound targets use. |
Read more in Administer.
Platform: run Proxus
| Screen | What it is for |
|---|---|
| My Profile | Your own account. |
| Demo Data | Load example plants to try Proxus. |
| White Labeling | Your own title, logo and styling on the hub. |
| License Info | The license of this installation and what it allows. |
| Config Editor | The configuration file of the platform. |
| System Logs | What the hub and the gateways have logged. |
| Database Health | A report on the state of the databases. |
Read more in Administer.
What's next
- Connect your first machine to see these screens fill with your own data.
- How Proxus is built explains what runs where behind these screens.
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