Use a Certificate for an AVEVA Insight Connection Token

Before you connect Geo SCADA Expert to AVEVA Insight (formerly Wonderware Online), you need to enter a connection token in Geo SCADA Expert (see Exporting Historical Data to AVEVA Insight and see Set Token). This enables you to encrypt the communications between the two applications.

You can only use the connection token on the computer that you used to generate it. Therefore, if your Geo SCADA Expert system has a Hot Standby configuration, you will also need to use a certificate so that the connection token can be shared by more than one computer. You will need to do this on the Hot-Standby servers in your system.

There are two types of certificate that you can use:

• Trusted Authority certificate—You need to purchase such a certificate from a certification authority, such as VeriSign, GlobalSign, DigiCert, GoDaddy, and StartCom. We strongly recommend that you use trusted certificates with Geo SCADA Expert.
• Non-trusted self-signed certificate—A non-trusted certificate does not provide authentication. The client cannot tell if the certificate is legitimate.

The supported certificate formats are those that are supported by Windows.

Before you can use the certificate, you need to contact AVEVA Insight Support and register the public certificate with them. You then need to install the certificate into the local machine certificate store.

To use a certificate, follow this procedure:

1. Open Windows Certificate Manager for the local machine. To do this:
   • In Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, click the Windows Start button, type mmc.exe in the search box, then press Enter. In the Microsoft Management Console, select File, click Add/Remove Snap-in, select Certificates, click the Add> button, select Computer account, click the Next button, select Local computer, click the Finish button, then click the OK button.
   • In Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, or Windows Server 2019, click the Windows Start button. Type certlm.msc in the search box then press Enter.
2. Import the certificate (see the Windows Help).
3. Open the certificate by double-clicking it.
4. Click the Details tab.
5. Scroll down the Details list until you find the Thumbprint field.
6. Click on the Thumbprint field and copy the Thumbprint value to the clipboard. The value is padded with spaces. You need to remove these spaces.

   For more information about using Windows Certificate Manager, see the Windows Help.

7. Paste the Thumbprint value into the PublisherThumbprint attribute in the AVEVA Insight Publisher file. The file has the name aahCloudConfigurator.exe.config. By default, the file is stored at the following location on a 64-bit machine:

   C:\Program Files\Wonderware\InsightPublisher\x64\aahCloudConfigurator.exe.config

   and at this location on a 32-bit machine:

   C:\Program Files\Wonderware\InsightPublisher\aahCloudConfigurator.exe.config

   The path will differ from the default if you have installed AVEVA Insight Publisher in a different folder.

   Example:

   The example below shows the Publisher Thumbprint attribute populated:

   

   If you do not want to use a certificate, set the Publisher Thumbprint attribute to blank (see below):