OPC UA Discovery

OPC UA discovery lets you explore the address space of an OPC UA server and identify the data points you want to bind to variables. Discovery runs on your edge gateway, so the OPC UA server only needs to be reachable from the gateway's local network — it never has to be exposed to the cloud.

How discovery works

1. Create an OPC UA connector for the server and assign it to a site
2. Make sure the site has an online edge deployment with the Edge Crawler utility enabled — the readiness banner on the Data Model tab walks you through any missing prerequisites
3. Open the connector's Data Model tab and start a discovery crawl, optionally choosing a starting node, a maximum depth, and whether to capture current values
4. The gateway's edge crawler connects to the OPC UA server, traverses the address space, and reports progress back to the platform
5. When the crawl completes, the result is saved as a new data model version you can browse, compare, and use for variable bindings

You can track running and past crawls in the Discovery History section of the Data Model tab.

Use cases

Running a discovery crawl 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 from the gateway and responding correctly
• Data type verification — confirming the data types and engineering units of specific nodes before mapping them to variables

Next steps