The ArchestrAnaut

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).

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If you are a blogger on a decent platform one of the metrics you will see is what kind of search terms people used to find out.  We run WordPress so we get this kind of useful intel.  When I see certain terms I want to run off and write a white paper on it because some is interested and I want to teach.  Unfortunately I just don’t have that kind of time.   With that in mind I have decided to take a handful of search terms, either frequent ones or interesting ones, and write a one or two line blurb about each.  They may distill down to even to two or three world comment.  Hopefully it will help someone along the way.

So,  without furuther ado I present the First Edition of of Search Term Lightning Round

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As many of you may have known, there was an issue with the alarm logger running as a service under any of the Windows Vista style OS’s.  You can reference Tech Note 725 for the details.

I exchanged a few emails with John Krajewski, the Product Manager for HMI/SCADA, and he has informed me that a fix for this issue will be released with the next patch, due out some time this Spring.  He also indicated that they are working on a longer term fix for the issue of having to run a separate component to log alarms.  In my discussions with him I told him I wanted a configuration in IAS like we have for the Historian.  We check a couple check boxes and go about our merry way.  I know underneath it might be some separate sub process but in terms of management and interface it’s simplified drastically.  No timeline on this one but I for one will be really excited to see it.

Andy & I have always been fairly frustrated with the Wonderware Alarm Logger service.  It almost seems like an afterthought for System Platform (just look at the service name:  New_AlarmLogger).  Perhaps the most frustrating part is trying to integrate it into a system with redundant App Servers.  To the developers:  please integrate this into the System Platform in a future release.

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