I would like a heartbeat from WIN-911 that I can monitor in FTViewSE.
I need to know that WIN-911 is not working. If I need an alarm annunciated, I need to be sure that WIN-911 is alive. Monitoring a heartbeat would let me know that it is still functioning and can be relied upon, especially after hours.
There are a few problems with your proposed workaround. 1: My understanding is that that method only tests a few of the WIN-911 modules, and that WIN-911 might be able to acknowledge the alarm, but not be able to do much else with it and you wouldn't know it. 2: Sililarly to 1, It provides no information about WIN-911's ability to complete a call. If there is an issue with the phone line or internet connection and WIN-911 cannot call out, I need to know about it so I can try the backup solutions (failover to secondary WIN-911, hardware dialer (cellular or otherwise), etc) and at the very least have a record that dialout was not working in my alarm history. 3: It pollutes the FTAE history. As the number of records in the FTAE database grows so does the time it takes to populate the Alarm History. After 6 months of running with just the Watchdog alarm it can take 20 seconds or more to open, and adding (essentially) a second Watchdog alarm only compounds the issue.
I propose that you make the heartbeat available through OPC like version 7 was. I realize that that can fail from more than WIN-911, but I would rather have a few false positives than false negatives. Another possible, though less than ideal solution would be to expand the IsActive.exe to provide the information.
We have a lot of water/wastewater customers on version 7, and cannot in good faith tell them to move to enterprise without this feature.
The problem with your suggestion is that it has the problem of generating dummy alarms which keep showing up on the operator���s alarm screen and it becomes very distracting. We have some indicators on HMI screens that inform the operators whenever there is a new alarm issued and these indicators would also be turning on and off, to the point that they would be ignored when it really needs attention for a real alarm.
The reason for wanting the heartbeat is to determine if we have a server failure on the server running the 911 software. We rely on the 911 software to tell us when things aren���t working, and yet we have no way to determine that 911 is up and running. We found this out when we had several alarms that occurred, but were not sent out through WIN-911. As it turned out, the virtual server that was running WIN-911 had gone to sleep. The solution was to never let it go to sleep. But if it ever happens that the virtual server crashes, we would like to annunciate that through FTViewSE operator stations.
Regards,
Larry
[cid:image006.png@01D427EE.45006320]
Larry Holzer | Computer Technician
4333 Garden Vista Drive ��� Riverview, FL ��� 33578
Phone: 813-405-3000 x 301
lholzer@cvista.com
www.cvista.com
Unfortunately, we don't have a way to write a heartbeat to FactoryTalk Alarms and Events as the toolkit we're using doesn't provide that functionality.
As a workaround, you can create an alarm that goes in and out of alarm and have WIN-911 automatically acknowledge it. If the alarm does not get acknowledged by WIN-911, you would know that WIN-911 is not connected to FTAE.
Steven,
There are a few problems with your proposed workaround. 1: My understanding is that that method only tests a few of the WIN-911 modules, and that WIN-911 might be able to acknowledge the alarm, but not be able to do much else with it and you wouldn't know it. 2: Sililarly to 1, It provides no information about WIN-911's ability to complete a call. If there is an issue with the phone line or internet connection and WIN-911 cannot call out, I need to know about it so I can try the backup solutions (failover to secondary WIN-911, hardware dialer (cellular or otherwise), etc) and at the very least have a record that dialout was not working in my alarm history. 3: It pollutes the FTAE history. As the number of records in the FTAE database grows so does the time it takes to populate the Alarm History. After 6 months of running with just the Watchdog alarm it can take 20 seconds or more to open, and adding (essentially) a second Watchdog alarm only compounds the issue.
I propose that you make the heartbeat available through OPC like version 7 was. I realize that that can fail from more than WIN-911, but I would rather have a few false positives than false negatives. Another possible, though less than ideal solution would be to expand the IsActive.exe to provide the information.
We have a lot of water/wastewater customers on version 7, and cannot in good faith tell them to move to enterprise without this feature.
Thanks,
Matthew Klemetsen
In Control, Inc.
Work: 763-783-9500 ext. 3016
Mobile: 612-750-7047
Steve, thanks for the response.
The problem with your suggestion is that it has the problem of generating dummy alarms which keep showing up on the operator���s alarm screen and it becomes very distracting. We have some indicators on HMI screens that inform the operators whenever there is a new alarm issued and these indicators would also be turning on and off, to the point that they would be ignored when it really needs attention for a real alarm.
The reason for wanting the heartbeat is to determine if we have a server failure on the server running the 911 software. We rely on the 911 software to tell us when things aren���t working, and yet we have no way to determine that 911 is up and running. We found this out when we had several alarms that occurred, but were not sent out through WIN-911. As it turned out, the virtual server that was running WIN-911 had gone to sleep. The solution was to never let it go to sleep. But if it ever happens that the virtual server crashes, we would like to annunciate that through FTViewSE operator stations.
Regards,
Larry
[cid:image006.png@01D427EE.45006320]
Larry Holzer | Computer Technician
4333 Garden Vista Drive ��� Riverview, FL ��� 33578
Phone: 813-405-3000 x 301
lholzer@cvista.com
www.cvista.com
Unfortunately, we don't have a way to write a heartbeat to FactoryTalk Alarms and Events as the toolkit we're using doesn't provide that functionality.
As a workaround, you can create an alarm that goes in and out of alarm and have WIN-911 automatically acknowledge it. If the alarm does not get acknowledged by WIN-911, you would know that WIN-911 is not connected to FTAE.
Regards,
Steven