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OPC IT Health Monitor
Plant IT Assets Require Monitoring
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Everyone understands the benefits of monitoring and controlling traditional plant
assets (valves, tanks, etc.). However, IT assets such as computers, software,
routers and switches also play an important part in a plant's day-to-day
operations. These infrastructure assets support the critical delivery, display
and control of plant process information. When IT assets fail, the consequences
can be just as critical as when the equipment controlling the process fails.
For example, an operator cannot respond to an alarm condition if the router
carrying the message has failed.
To further compound the problem, when an IT asset is still operating, but
outside the bounds of normal operations, operators may misdiagnose this as a
failure in the underlying equipment, rather than in the components that deliver
or process the equipment's data. If a router is failing intermittently due to
occasional network traffic spikes, it may appear as though the underlying
equipment is to blame, when this is not the case. If a software application
pins the CPU, other programs running on the computer may lose data, or report
incorrect values, and appear to be at fault when they are not. These types of
problems have traditionally been very difficult to isolate and resolve, as
plant engineers unknowingly struggle with IT issues.
For these reasons, plants must monitor these IT assets in the same way that
they monitor traditional plant equipment, and have a method for notifying the
correct personnel when problems appear.
MatrikonOPC IT Health Monitor Product Overview
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Are you finding out about your IT failures from your users? Be proactive rather
than reactive. Watch this informative video and learn how a MatrikonOPC Health
Monitor solution can solve your lack of information and improve your ability to
predict failures.
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With
the OPC IT Health Monitor solution, companies can integrate the monitoring of
these assets alongside traditional pieces of plant equipment. When a software
application crashes, or a network switch loses it's connection, companies can
notify the correct personnel, so they can respond in a timely manner to avoid
production losses.
OPC IT Health monitor can deliver failure and problem
notifications via email messages and as OPC Alarms & Events (A&E)
messages, for integration into existing Alarm management solutions.
In
addition to computer and network assets, OPC IT Health monitor can monitor data
from other devices and databases, via OPC DA (Data Access), to provide a single
complete health monitoring solution.
The following diagram illustrates
the OPC Health Monitoring solution:
There are 4 components to this solution:
Monitoring Network
Devices
The OPC Server for SNMP provides connectivity to SNMP
compliant devices such as network switches, UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply)
systems, media converters and other network devices. The OPC Server enables full
monitoring and control of SNMP-enabled devices from any OPC compliant
application such as IT Management Systems and HMIs.
Monitoring Computers and
Applications
The OPC Server for Windows Task Manager
(Performance Monitor) enables the display or archive of performance information
on a PC or even its individual processes. This OPC server is an invaluable tool
for technical support and IT personnel because CPU usage spikes may affect the
data acquisition process of most applications.
Monitoring Traditional Assets
Because OPC IT Health Monitor can collect data from any OPC
real-time data source (OPC DA), you can use it to monitor any other device or
application that has an OPC DA server. This lets you tie in plant equipment with
your IT assets in one monitoring and notification system.
Sending
Notifications
OPC Messenger is another MatrikonOPC advanced solution that provides both
email and OPC A&E notification messages for the monitoring of real-time OPC
data sources. OPC Messenger includes the OPC A&E Server for OPC Real-time
data, and the OPC Alarms and Event client for Email
systems.
Summary
In order to implement a comprehensive
monitoring and control solution, it is important to include IT assets in
addition to traditional assets. A poorly performing application or router can be
a much more difficult problem to isolate without tools like OPC IT Health
Monitor.
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