Support Alarms and Conditions
Please provide additional information on how we can support Alarms and Conditions (Alarms and Events). In order to get a better understanding of what is needed on our side, we need plenty of information to help build a comprehensive and informative use case. Please comment with the following of information:
o What is your primary use case for collecting A&C data?
o How do you collect A&C data today?
o How is their A&C data stored in PI?
o What sort of alarm data do you have? I.e. instantaneous alarms, acknowledgements, alarms with a start and stop time?
o What is the preferable way to create Alarms and Conditions within PI (i.e. PI Tags, Event Frames, etc.)
o What is your best estimate for how many alarms/events should be created in a year?
o What do you use to consume A&C data? How do you utilize A&C data afterwards?
o How do you visualize A&C data?
This information will allow us to build an A&C feature set that fits the needs of our broader customer base.
AdminTodd Brown
(Product Manager, OSIsoft)
shared this idea
This feedback item has been moved from the PI Connectors forum to the PI Adapters forum.
We are continuing to support the PI Connector for OPC UA with stability and security releases. However, for feature enhancements, we are considering them for the PI Adapter for OPC UA. We would like to hear more about your use cases for this functionality, so please share with us in the comments.
15 comments
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Hobbe
commented
What is your primary use case for collecting A&C data?
We use the A&C data for troubleshooting, root case analyses and continous improvements!o How do you collect A&C data today?
We use the OPC AE Interface.o How is their A&C data stored in PI?
We are currently investigating if we can store it in event frames.o What sort of alarm data do you have? I.e. instantaneous alarms, acknowledgements, alarms with a start and stop time?
We have all of the above alarms!o What is the preferable way to create Alarms and Conditions within PI (i.e. PI Tags, Event Frames, etc.)
Preferably it has to be stored in a relational database, maybe as Event frames. I think if the adapter can create event frames would be the best!o What is your best estimate for how many alarms/events should be created in a year?
We have 10.000.000 events per year and rising!o What do you use to consume A&C data? How do you utilize A&C data afterwards?
We use it when a failure occurs in our plants for trouble shooting and root cause analyses. We also plan to use it as reports!o How do you visualize A&C data?
We are trying out PI Vision Events list but are not really satisfied with the performance and flexibility.
Also reports can be created in Power BI using the integrator for BI. -
Roger Palmen
commented
OPC UA A&E is a must as this is used in control systems to capture batch exceptions which then need to be captured and reported using RtReports.
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David Spiese
commented
Customers are telling me that in pharma, they've reached the inflection point where vendors are only offering OPC UA. Before when vendors' UA server was a wrapper, they could always get to alarms with OPC A&E. That's no longer the case, and they now must access this data from OPC UA Alarms and Conditions or they aren't going to get it.
This is vital for operations as alarm history is required in pharma manufacturing and we've historically had products to get this data.
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FabioSantoprete
commented
OPC UA Alarm and Events retrieval is an important feature that i would like to see in PI, there are different business partner that invested resources to update the shoo floor equipment to allow OPC UA connection, so i consider the unavailability of A&C a gap of the OSiPi system.
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Dirk De Vocht
commented
Alarms and Events data from automation systems become more and more important to store for long term. This demand comes from the need to optimize processes through data analytics and data modeling tools. Ideally this Alarm & Condition data is store in the same data repository as trend data.
Moving from OPC Classic to OPC UA is key as we have systems that are not providing the OPC Classic interface. When the PI connector is not supporting the Alarm capturing, we'll need to setup other systems that does provide the OPC UA Alarms & Conditions and long time storage capabilities. -
dasoendjojo
commented
Seconding Yusuf Cördük's comment, it would be great to have the option to choose between EF storage and PI tag storage for the Alarms and Conditions.
Our end users prefer to have the Alarms data as strings in PI tags.
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JohanVanAcker@Pfizer
commented
For the moment we work with the OPC A&E interrface to get alarms out of Siemens WinCC, but that is not very fexible. So the OPC UA connector should have at least the same functionality, preferable more like eventframes for alarms, one PI tag for all the messages, ...
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Yusuf_Cördük
commented
We would appreciate if there would be a possibility to choose between Event Frame storage and PI Tag storage, or even both at the same time.
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bmolin
commented
Any news or update regarding this, this is a must when going OPC-UA.
Could you share any viable workarounds this would be apprichiated. -
Conny
commented
Hi
What is the status regarding this function?
We want to collect Alarms and Conditions from Siemens 840Dsl_828D_OPCUA
This is critical for discrete manufacturing -
photi24
commented
hi
we are using WinCC and other System as SCADA. Today we import the Alarm Data to an Pi Tag with the format String. The different colums from the scada system we sepaerate with a pipe symbol. For history this is fine. But in case of reporting and analytics this is very bad.I would be happy if there is an oportunity or a speicial pi point format for alarms.
The nessary coloums are:
- Alarm ID
- TimeStamp
- Location
- Messagetext
- Duration
- Status (Start, End)
- Class -
Hobbe
commented
Hi!
Currently we are using OPC AE and storing the events in Event Frames. When we move to use OPC UA we need to start to work with Alarms & Conditions instead!
Also i want a way to native create Event Frames within the Connector for OPC UA.
//Magnus -
Tjeerd Zwijnenberg
commented
Important for Rail industry, so yes
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FranzK
commented
we also use WinCC and other scada systems. about what to collect/ not collect, there should be same filtering possible like in the scada system itself, so i want the possibility to filter on every attribute the scada system offers. Naming for event frame should also be possible. E.g. Asset_Alarmtext or Alarmtext_Messageclass,...
The eventframes should be built without using PI Tags (Tagrefference). The behaviour of the end of eventframe (end eventframe when alarm is gone or with quitting) should be configurable in the connector -
Hobbe
commented
Hi! We are about to do a pilot with alarms and events to let them be stored into event frames!
I heared it was a new product from OSI regarding this issue! We want to be involved in a Beta test.
We use Siemens WinCC and ABB 800 xA DCS systems.//Magnus Holmbom, Vattenfall Vattenkraft AB
