OPC IT Health Monitor

【Introduction】

Everyone understands the benefits of monitoring and controlling traditional plantassets
(valves, tanks, etc.).
However, IT assets such as computers, software, routersand 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.

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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