As a PI System administator of a busy PI Data Archive, I find that my message logs are unwieldy. I can miss important messages in the flood of connection messages and other repetitive messages. I would like to be able to search my message logs while excluding certain message types (like in Event Viewer). For example, I would like to be able to run a query that excludes connection messages from pinetmgr and "User query failed" messages so I can quickly narrow in the problem I'm looking for.

Filtering on severity has proven an imperfect solution because sometimes important messages are written with a low severity level.

There are other similar ideas out there on this site but I would like to see the ability to skip numbers in the Digital States Enumeration. We have areas of the plant that have states which don't map well to a 1,2,3.... set of states. Some are bit settings and others are just high numbers. Let users skip numbers and enter what they want (100,200,300, etc.) Numbers that aren't defined will be filled in by the system as "undefined" or something similar when shown in vision. It's difficult to create a set with 250 values and doesn't need to require a user to individually create a lot of "blank" values to get to the one you really want (I know you can import too but still).

PI System Management Tools is more of a client-side program, so it does not make sense for it to be packaged with a server-side program like the PI Interface Configuration Utility. This increases the size of the install kit, increases the extraction and installation time, and leaves the user with lots of junk programs that they are not sure if they can safely uninstall (PI Interface Configuration Utility, PI Buffer Subsystem, PI Spt DLL, PIGenericNames DLL).

Please remove anything specific to the PI Interface Configuration Utility from the PI System Management Tools install kit. Also grey out "Interface Configuration Utility" in the Tools menu to reflect this change.

Schedule data archive shifts occur and create archive files based upon a Minimum Archive Size calculation. This calculation is based upon the total count of record numbers. When large amounts of tags are deleted, the total number of tags is reduced but the record number count remains the same...thus creating a huge discrepancy between the two counts.

The minimum archive file size is based on total record numbers. Thus, if you delete a large number of tags (e.g. Reduce a 5M tags system down to 1M tags after splitting a collective into multiple collectives)....then the system will artificially create very large archive file sizes which are filled at a low percentage. This calculation result is different from the Archive_AutoArchiveSize calculation which looks at the count of active tags. The deviation between the two leads to confusion and difficulty properly scheduling archive shifts, along with generating incorrect % full results (which look at the total record number count, not the total tags....this would be artificially false low).

If the Compressing attribute of a PI Point is set to Off, then the compression settings are greyed out, which makes sense because they are irrelevant if Compressing is Off.

However, if a PI Point has its Archiving attribute set to Off, nothing is greyed out, even though the exception and compression settings and the Compressing attribute are all irrelevant.

I propose changing the layout of the Classic tab to reflect the relationship between these settings. If Archiving is Off, do not show the user the exception settings, compression settings, or the Compressing attribute. If Archiving is On, show the exception settings and the Compressing attribute. Only show the compression settings if Compressing is On.

For extra clarity, consider making an exception equivalent to the Compressing attribute.