OPC UA Discovery

The OPC UA Discovery tool lets you connect to any OPC UA server and explore its address space interactively. Use it to understand the data model of your industrial equipment before setting up connectors and variable bindings.

To open the tool, navigate to Tools → OPC UA Discovery in the main navigation.

Connecting to a server

Enter the connection details to establish a session with the OPC UA server:

If you select Username/Password authentication, additional fields appear for the username and password.

Click Connect to establish the session. A green "Connected" badge appears when the connection is successful, along with a Disconnect button.

Browsing the address space

Once connected, the browser displays a split-pane view:

Tree view (left pane)

The left pane shows the OPC UA address space as a hierarchical tree, starting from the Objects folder. Click the expand icon on any node to load its children.

Each node displays:

• Display name — the human-readable name
• Icon — indicates the node class (folder for objects, variable icon for variables, code icon for methods)
• Data type badge — for variable nodes, shows the data type (for example, Double, String, Boolean)
• Access level badge — for variable nodes, shows Read, Write, or ReadWrite

You can filter the tree by typing in the search field above it. The filter matches against display names, browse names, and data type names.

Node details (right pane)

Selecting a node in the tree displays its full attributes in the right pane:

All node types:

Variable nodes also show:

The node ID is displayed with a copy button so you can easily use it when configuring OPC UA bindings.

Running a discovery crawl

In addition to interactive browsing, you can run a discovery crawl that traverses a section of the address space and stores the results for later analysis.

To start a discovery crawl:

1. Browse the tree and select a starting node
2. Optionally set a max depth to limit how deep the crawl goes
3. Toggle Include values to capture current values during the crawl
4. Click Start Discovery

The crawl runs in the background. You can monitor its progress in the discovery history list below the browser.

Crawl statuses

Viewing results

When a crawl completes, click View Model to open the full crawled tree in a dialog. You can browse the discovered nodes, inspect their attributes, and identify the data points you want to bind to variables.

Session management

Discovery sessions are temporary and expire after 10 minutes of inactivity. If your session expires, reconnect using the connection form.

The tool creates a new session each time you connect — it does not reuse sessions from connectors or other tools.

Use cases

The OPC UA Discovery tool is useful for:

• Initial site survey — understanding what data points are available on a new piece of equipment
• Binding preparation — finding the correct node IDs before creating variable bindings
• Troubleshooting — verifying that an OPC UA server is reachable and responding correctly
• Data type verification — confirming the data types and engineering units of specific nodes before mapping them to variables