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Getting Started

This guide gets your industrial data into Control Seat and shows you how to start analyzing it. By the end you'll have data flowing in, a trend you can investigate, and a view you can share. If we deployed Control Seat as part of an integration project, your environment may already be set up for you.

Before you start

Pick where Control Seat runs:

  • Cloud SaaS — sign up at controlseat.com, pick a workspace, and your tenant is provisioned automatically. Nothing to install.
  • Self-hosted — download an installer (.pkg / .msi / .deb / .rpm) for your OS from controlseat.com/download. Double-click, browser opens to the gateway. See the On-Prem Deployment guide for licensing, TLS, and updates.

The rest of this guide is the same for both.

Step 1: Create A Project

After signing in, create a new project. Projects are containers for your work — tags, trends, dashboards, and flows. You might use one per facility, site, or team.

Step 2: Connect Your Data

Control Seat uses tags as a universal data layer. A tag is a named value that updates in real time, and Control Seat keeps every tag in sync no matter where it comes from.

  1. Create tags in the tag system (e.g., default/pump/speed, default/line1/temperature).
  2. Connect each tag to a source:
    • Industrial systems and historians — OPC UA, Ignition, MQTT, and AVEVA PI.
    • Databases and APIs — PostgreSQL, MySQL, InfluxDB, Prometheus, and REST. The connector list keeps growing.
    • Manual or simulated values for testing.
  3. Enable history on the tags you want to analyze so they're available for trends, forecasting, and AI analysis. Most sources record to Control Seat's built-in historian; AVEVA PI and Ignition history is read live from the source system.

Tags stream live and are recorded historically, so everything downstream — trends, dashboards, and flows — reads from the same place and stays in sync automatically.

Step 3: Investigate In The Trends Workbench

The Trends Workbench is where most analysis happens. Open it to explore the data you just connected.

  • Plot signals together on synced charts — stack them or overlay them on one axis.
  • Scrub through history with shared zoom, pan, and a cursor across every chart.
  • Run analysis tools — detect anomalies and step changes, forecast a signal forward (including AutoARIMA with confidence bands), run FFT / frequency analysis, compute statistics and histograms, and search for repeating patterns.
  • Define conditions that highlight the time windows where something is true, drawn right on the chart as capsules.
  • Save your work as a per-user worksheet and write up findings in the built-in journal.

Step 4: Ask AI

Ask about your operations in plain language. Control Seat's AI uses the same analytics tools to find anomalies, correlate signals, and explain what changed, then can build a view to show it. Configure your AI provider in settings first.

Step 5: Build A Dashboard (Optional)

When you want to operationalize what you found, build a view with the drag-and-drop editor:

  • Charts — line, bar, gauge, scatter, and more for visualizing data
  • Text and labels — headers, status indicators, and annotations
  • Tables — alarm tables and data displays
  • Images — logos, diagrams, and P&IDs
  • Embedded views — reuse other pages as components

Bind any block property to a tag and it updates live as values change. You can also type a description and let AI generate the dashboard for you, or drop down to custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for bespoke components.

Step 6: Add Automation (Optional)

Turn what you learned into logic that runs on its own:

  • Flows — visual rules and automations, no code required for most tasks (e.g., "email ops when pump temp > 180", "post every alarm to Slack"). Flows run 24/7 on the gateway. See the Flows docs.
  • Scripts — when you need code:
    • Binding scripts — transform tag values before they reach a block (e.g., convert units, set colors based on thresholds)
    • Page scripts — custom JavaScript that runs on the page (e.g., subscribe to tags, update multiple blocks)
    • Gateway scripts — server-side automation (e.g., alarms, webhooks, scheduled reports)

See the Scripting docs for details and examples.

Step 7: Publish & Share

When a view is ready, publish it. You'll get a URL that anyone with access can open to see the live, streaming dashboard.

Next Steps

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