Kepware Assistance

Team,

Project details: Make Kepware monitor the PLC connection and send an email if plc is offline for x amount of time.


Seems simple enough, however, I have limited experience with kepware, short of changing the IP address to a PLC that is already set up in kepware.

When they sent me out for training a while back, I was given a full version of KepserverEX V6, this is a fully functional set up with all applications, same as what we use in house. This version that I have requires a restart after a couple of hours, so it cant be used in a production environment. This does give me the option to poke around and not mess up the main system.

Things I have figured out:
I can add a device.
I can generate the tag database.
I can see said tags in the OPC client.

I am kind of stuck here, I am not able to see the tag value, but I am not getting any errors. Getting frustrated is half my issues, not having something to reference to is the other half.

I do have some "training" items that has gotten me this far, but I am looking for some more documentation and or tutorials on how to progress through the alarm and event set up.

Once I can get this working in my test environment, I will feel more comfortable with adding the alarm function to the live environment.

I have a 5370 test PLC that just has a few timers running, so I have the hardware and the kepware software, issues are at the meat level..


Thank you in advance,

Gad

The tag value is only shown in the OPC Client I'm sure there are many new features in V6 onwards but really the OPC Server is only the go between plc & some higher level system. If you are using either the Kepserver client or some other you should see the data in the client if there are no errors

I am able to view the tags value in OPC Client, but only when I first turn on the connection. It wont update when the value changes, even if I manually trigger the read. I am fairly sure there is something in here that I am missing.
Maybe tomorrow my brain will be less mooshy and I can have a fresh look at the things I've done.

Kepware or whatever OPC server you are using isn't going to do that work for you.

OPC server is just a piece of software that serves machine data to you. You will need a piece of client software to do monitoring and notification work for you. You probably been playing with the Quick OPC client, which is a typical piece of test OPC client for toubleshooting purpose.

There are a lot of options to do this, not all require an OPC server. A lot of the HMI software such as Ignition, include this functionality. Win911 is a big name player in this field as well.

One option is to select all the tags in the Quick Client and right click, then choose synchronous device read.

To have them update automatically you need to enter an update rate in the group properties just below the name, you also have to make the group and tags active (Green) .

A caveat to watch for - if you open the quick client form the config screen, it will download all the tags, if you don't want that , open the quick client form the start menu, then it opens empty and you can add the tags you want.

Wanted to get back with you guys and thank you for the support, however, my issues still remain. I have reached out to another facility that has already done what I was trying to do. They will walk me through the first alarm set up on the live server and turn me loose.
Although I was unable to get everything to work properly in the test environment, digging around in it has given me a better understanding of the Kepware environment.


Gad

I don't see where you mention which notificaiton app you are using. For monitoring comm to a PLC, I think the recommendaiton is using the status tag

Channel.Device._system_error

if that change to 1 then it means the OPC server can't talk to the device.

Now that I have stepped away from it for a few hours, I will try your recommendation.