Ignition 8.3

In case you missed the news at the Ignition Community Conference in September 2025, Ignition 8.3 is finally here!

We were in full force at the event, with mentions in the Keynote presentation, a presentation on an Ignition Maker Edition project from one of our team members, and lots of amazing conversations with fans of Corso Systems!

Since 8.3 brings a number of new features to the fold we are going to cover the most interesting ones based on our vast Ignition experiences over the years, and how they can help you take your Ignition system to the next level.

If you want some more insight into when you should start using Ignition 8.3, Corso Systems founder and CEO Alex Marcy put a great run down up on LinkedIn recently, we recommend checking it out if you are looking to make the switch from an older version or start using Ignition 8.3 as your first version!

Perspective Drawing Tool

As system integrators we are used to having lots of different programs open at any given time in addition to the Ignition Designer. One of the necessary evils prior to the release of Ignition 8.3 was having to use a scalable vector graphic (SVG) drawing program like Inkscape to manage complex graphics in SVG formats.

Using the Perspective Drawing Tool you can create and edit SVG files directly in the designer. This was by far the most requested and talked about feature missing from Perspective until Ignition 8.3. It seemed like any Q&A session at ICC or any Inductive Automation Webinar since 2019 had at least one question asking when this feature would be released.

For anyone unfamiliar with SVG files they let you draw basically anything you want in a format that can scale with your screen resolution with no loss in detail. This is very helpful in Perspective with mobile responsive designs where you need things to look good on a computer monitor as well as a tablet or phone. The alternative is to use a standard image format like JPG or PNG where you need to build a graphic to look best at a particular resolution. When it scales you may see things become unreadable when scaled to a smaller size, or become pixelated when scaling to a larger size.

The most basic example of SVG graphics in Perspective are the components in the Perspective Symbols Palette. This gives you access to pre-built graphics for motors, pumps, sensors, valves, and tanks. All of these are built with SVG graphics meaning you can make them as small or large as you wish and they will look “good” at all sizes.

For something simple like a circle there isn’t a huge difference in workflows between using the Perspective Drawing Tool and an external program like Inkscape. You simply generate the circle, import it into the Perspective View you are working on and you can then bind whatever properties you need like color, line width, etc.

To be honest we didn’t understand the need for the Drawing Tool, at least at the level of enthusiasm people were asking for it. Even in Vision you’d need a separate image editing package to get things looking crisp. Where the real power of the Perspective Drawing Tool comes into play is when you are working with more complex objects and need to bind individual pieces of the SVG to specific values.

To do this without the Perspective Drawing Tool you would need to create different “layers” of SVG files each with their own bindings to accomplish your goal. Yes, this was a hassle, and we were not thinking about the power of being able to bind to items within the SVG directly.

Using the Perspective Drawing Tool you have access to everything in the SVG file with a lot more binding options available in a single SVG image. You can also easily set up properties like how to scale the image with the View’s size, put a set amount of space around the image, and manage alignment of everything in the SVG image.

One of the really cool features of the drawing tool is any SVG graphics you already have in your project are directly editable in the SVG Drawing Tool so you can take advantage of it without having to make any changes to your existing projects.

Perspective Forms

If you have spent any amount of time around web development, even sticking to basic HTML something you have likely seen is the <form> tag. This lets you set up a form like you would use in just about any business focused software package to enter things like customer or work order information, or most commonly in automation recipes and batch information, and save it to a database.

With the release of Perspective in Ignition 8.0 not having built-in forms support was an obviously glaring omission. Granted a lot of plant floor applications don’t require the use of forms, however with the ability to integrate Ignition with just about any technology on the planet it was something we, and nearly everyone else we talked to over the years, built a framework to manage.

The reason forms are a very handy tool in the web development world is they give you the ability to collect input from your users with standard components like text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, and dropdowns then package whatever your user entered up into a defined dataset you can save to a database, use to populate your form to view details on a particular record, and edit/update the data for that record as needed.

This enables the concept of a Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) system where you can easily build out an overview of all your records with a table, then select a record in the table to view or edit the relevant data for that record in a form, use a Create form to add new records to the database, or delete particular records as needed.

If you aren’t using Ignition 8.3 don’t worry, you have access to our own PlasticORM Ignition Exchange Resource, or the fully-featured PikaView Ignition Exchange Resource from Inductive Automation to help you easily manage forms without upgrading.

We will have more information and walkthroughs of how to use the built-in Perspective Forms functionality in future posts, however it is one of the most talked about features leading up to Ignition 8.3 and will likely become one of the most used over the coming years.

Event Streams

Ignition can connect to just about any technology platform. With its initial focus on getting PLC data into SQL databases Ignition had a number of tools to simplify storing data in a database like the SQL Bridge Module and Transaction Groups along with a robust set of scripting functions for interacting with databases directly.

Using tools like the HTTPClient scripting functions building integrations into other tools like Kafka based systems, APIs to interact with other client/server systems, and even Ignition’s built-in event system was possible, however it required a fair amount of know-how and development work to implement these integrations.

The Event Streams functionality in Ignition 8.3 simplifies this workflow for the most common types of event streams used in manufacturing. To put it simply Event Streams are similar to Transaction Groups for SQL databases, giving you an easy to configure way to integrate Ignition into various event platforms without having to write complex scripts.

Many companies will not ever need to use Event Streams, however if you do use things like Kafka or integrate with APIs it is a powerful tool in the Ignition arsenal.

Core Historian

From the very beginning Ignition has had a built-in Process Historian using the Tag Historian Module. This let you store any of your tag data from Ignition directly into a SQL database, and was arguably the cheapest and easiest way to add this functionality to your process control system on the market.

Until the late 2010’s the idea of something specifically built for this type of data wasn’t readily available in the manufacturing world unless you were using a purpose built Process Historian like Canary Labs’ offering. This type of historian is known as a time-series database.

A time-series database is useful for process data because it stores data in a smaller format using an identifier for the specific datapoint, the value at that time, the timestamp, and the quality of the value. This allows you to store the same amount of data as you would in the normal Ignition Historian with a smaller footprint on disk.

Time Series Databases are also optimized for storing data in a sequential order offering faster read/write capabilities compared to standard SQL databases.

One huge benefit of using the Core Historian functionality in 8.3 is that you can have a built-in historian out of the box without needing to spin up and use a SQL database. This will speed up deployment time, reduce IT involvement in setting up an Ignition system, and simplify the number of steps required to get a system up and running with historical data collection.

One item of note is in 8.3.0 the Core Historian is effectively part of the Ignition Gateway, so can only run on the same server as the Ignition Gateway, and you will need to wait until a future release to have access to a more enterprise friendly Core Historian system with redundancy, data backup/restore capability, and integration with external QuestDB databases.

DevOps Integrations and REST API

Much like Event Streams, many companies may never need to take advantage of the DevOps tools enabled in Ignition 8.3. If you have a single Ignition Gateway or a redundant pair of Gateways it is easy enough to manage everything manually.

Where the DevOps tools come into play are for larger enterprises who need to set up large Ignition systems with many Gateways, Edge Nodes, and database connections. The addition of the Ignition Gateway REST API also simplifies this process by allowing tools like Ansible to communicate directly with the gateway to determine what changes need to be pushed out to keep everything up to date.

Ignition 8.3 also exposes everything you might need to configure on a Gateway in human readable files which greatly simplifies using version control tools like Git or Subversion, a much needed feature in the Ignition ecosystem.

For more information on the DevOps features we highly recommend checking out the Technical Keynote from ICC when it goes live early next year, or purchasing a livestream pass to watch it now if you are interested in these tools.

Siemens Driver Updates

One other very often asked for update is the Siemens Enhanced Driver. This driver enables symbolic addressing in Siemens PLCs as opposed to the manual addressing approach used in the original Siemens drivers, now called Siemens Legacy Drivers.

This driver also enables tag browsing on Siemens PLCs which is a wonderful addition to the Ignition platform.

Previously you needed to know the specific address of tags in a Siemens PLC and either manually enter them in the OPC Path field, or manage everything in Excel to import tags. This also meant you would need to manage offsets and data types for various tags, creating a lot of extra effort to integrate Ignition with a Siemens PLC compared to Allen Bradley PLCs with the native Logix driver, or OPC-UA connections like to Opto 22 groov EPICs, or other PLCs with an OPC-UA Server.

You can also use the built-in OPC-UA server in Siemens PLCs that has been around for a number of years if desired.

The one item to note with the Siemens Enhanced Driver is it is NOT included with the standard Ignition Platform license, so will have an additional cost to add the module to your Ignition Gateways.

This is pure speculation on our part for some context since we have been working with Ignition since 2009. With Inductive Automation based in Folsom CA some of the first Ignition projects were out on the West Coast, and over time Ignition started making its way eastward across the US. Until around 2017 it was common to talk to companies in the midwest who had never heard of Ignition. Since Siemens PLCs are much less common in the USA compared to Allen Bradley it seemed like Inductive Automation spent their development resources on the biggest market with more fully featured Allen Bradley drivers.

As Ignition made its way across the Atlantic to Europe where Siemens PLCs are the market leader it makes sense they would have spent time over the development lifecycle of Ignition 8.3 to build out a fully featured driver to meet market demand. It seems like all of the folks working with Ignition and Siemens PLCs were very happy they did, this feature has been well received since it was introduced with the Ignition 8.3 Beta.

Wrapping Up

As with any major release of Ignition we are super excited about the possibilities Ignition 8.3 enables for manufacturing companies! There are a lot of new features people have been asking for over the last decade in some cases, and it is great to see Inductive Automation looking to the community for feature requests and implementing them along the way!