No Alarms in the Alarm Client
I had a recent issue with my alarms not showing up in my alarm banner in InTouch (Windows 7 & IAS 2012). What was weird was that I could trigger an alarm and it would log to the alarm database, but I couldn’t see in the live alarms banner. Closing and restarting the InTouch app had zero effect, but rebooting the PC seemed to fix it on the first or second reboot. The only messages in the SMC related to “Attempting to Connect to Provider ‘\\$localhost:\galaxy’” (see below).
During troubleshooting, I tried using the old school InTouch alarm client in addition to the aaAlarmClient. Neither worked. Luckily, a few minutes worth of digging on the WDN site returned a very promising result:
Technote 791 (Galaxy Alarms are not Displayed in an Alarm Client).
https://wdnresource.wonderware.com/support/kbcd/html/1/t002574.htm
As it turns out the order of startup for certain programs (Alarm Manager and SuiteLink Service) is critical to getting alarms in the alarm client. I checked who started the Alarm Manager using the SysInternals program Process Explorer. As a side note, the whole SysInternals suite is available from Microsoft & is really handy. The alarm logger service had started the alarm manager. I then checked through the Windows Event Log like it mentions in the technote & sure enough, the Alarm Logger service started before the SuiteLink service.
The workaround I came up with was to force the Alarm Logger service to depend on the SuiteLink service, which should force them to start in the correct order. To do this you need to:
- Go to Start->Run, type “regedit”, and hit enter.
- Navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\New_AlarmLogger”
- Right-click in the right pane & add a new Multi-String Value
- Name it “DependOnService” and set its value to “slssvc”
To verify the Wonderware Alarm Logger service now depends on the Wonderware SuiteLink service, do the following:
- Go to Start->Run, type “services.msc”, and hit enter.
- Navigate to “Wonderware Alarm Logger Service”
- Open the properties dialog for it & go to the “Dependencies” tab
- You should see “Wonderware SuiteLink” listed as a dependency.
What are your experiences in setting indirect tags from intouch to galaxy tags?
That’s the way we used to to all of our faceplates. Do you have a specific question or would you like a specific example? These days unless you have a very specific reason for needing to do this I’m not sure what the application would be……. Actually come to think of it I don’t think we did indirects we just did the substitution technique, can’t recall the name of it right now.
- Andy
I use the technique but it is not perfect becouse you have the end time in which the driver Suite Link connect the tags from galaxy to intouch. For example if you use this technique in loop “for” you can have the error (“not write tags”).
I try to use dirfrent method
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I have similar problem with aaClientAlarm but on Win XP sp3 when i used teamviewer or windows remote desktop.
The aaClient services go to error when i connect to my server desktop use teamviewer.
Solution this situation was go to user account ->change log and unlogg method -> an uncheck option (“use quick method to switch user”)
Sory for my easy english
Thank you for this! I had no idea SuiteLink was required to start before Alarm Manager… this could help explain a lot of weird issues I’ve had in the past with alarms. Nice one.