What is Certification test lab in OPC UA?

Glossary · Conformance

Certification test lab

An OPC Foundation Certification Test Lab is an independent laboratory that certifies a product, not a person, against named Profiles and Facets, running the Compliance Test Tool plus interoperability and robustness testing. Certification is granted per product and per version, after which the product may be listed and carry the certified-product logo.

What is certified, and what is not

The programme is product-level. A specific product at a specific version is certified for named profiles and facets. The OPC Foundation does not issue individual credentials: there is no OPC Foundation Certified Engineer, and no training provider, this site included, can award or claim equivalence to OPC Foundation certification. Any person-level certificate you hold, from a vendor or from a course, is that provider's own credential.

The pattern with SDKs

A stack library is not certified; an application built with it is. open62541 states that an example server built with version 1.4 was certified for the Standard Server 2017 Profile, and the UA-.NETStandard reference server has been certified through an OPC Foundation Certification Test Lab and is continuously verified against the latest Compliance Test Tool. node-opcua offers certifiable builds only to professional-support customers. The commercial consequence is that choosing a certified stack does not make your product certified, and your certification budget is your own.

What a lab run involves

Beyond the Compliance Test Tool, labs add interoperability testing against other vendors' clients and servers, plus robustness and fuzz-style testing of the protocol layer. The interoperability workshop track exists separately from formal certification and is where multi-vendor problems usually surface first. Because certification is version-bound, a shipping product needs a re-certification plan, not a one-off project.

What to ask a vendor

Ask three questions: which product and which version is certified, for which named profiles and facets, and at which lab and on what date. All three should be answerable from a public certification listing. Vague answers, or a certified sibling product, mean the software you are buying was not tested.

Example

How to phrase the question in a purchase specification

Required (product-level, evidence must be a public certification record):
  Product name and version:  ..........................
  Certified profiles:        Standard UA Server Profile (2017)
  Certified facets:          DataAccess, Methods,
                             HistoricalRawData2022,
                             AggregateHistorical2022
  Certification test lab:    ..........................
  Date / re-certification:   ..........................

Not acceptable as evidence:
  - "built on a certified SDK"
  - a certification record for a different product or version
  - a ServerProfileArray screenshot (a claim, not a test result)

The mistake people make: Accepting "our SDK is certified" as proof that the delivered server is certified. Certification attaches to a product and a version, and the usual pattern is that an example server built with a stack was certified, not the stack. Ask for the record for the exact build you are buying.

Defined in: Part 7 - Profiles defines the profiles certified against. The certification programme itself is an OPC Foundation programme, not part of IEC 62541.

Related concepts

Compliance Test Tool (CTT)Profile Facet Conformance unit ServerProfileArray ProductUri

Last verified 7 September 2026 against OPC UA 1.05.07. OPC UA Connect is an educational resource and is not affiliated with the OPC Foundation.