OPCUA server for monitoring Windows 10 PCs condition

AlfredoQuintero

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Hello:
Question for SCADA/HMI experts.
One of our customers is responsible for planning and selection of key technologies for manufacturing engineering for one of the largest automotive makers here. He is an OT (operational technologies) kind-of-guy, as opposed to an IT kind-of-guy (and therefore not familiar with IT technologies and perhaps keen to not to have to be too involved with his huge IT department).

He would like to be able to take advantage of the OPCUA technology (which is becoming ubiquitous in his company) to be able to monitor things that the IT people would normally monitor with IT tools (SNMP and what not), such as hard drive performance, free space in the hard disk, CPU load, if possible CPU temperature, and so on, through his OPCUA client SCADA applications.

I have been looking around and I cannot find such an OPCUA server product for Windows 10. Does anybody know of such a product? Is this idea completely crazy and therefore should I politely advice my customer to contact his IT people and find a way to have them take care of this kind of monitoring of SCADA and HMI infrastructure? Or, does he have a point and such an OPCUA server would be of value for manufacturers who need to maintain large number of Windows 10 computers.o_O
 
With one of the OPC UA Server SDK available on the market, a experienced programmer could develop what they ask for, only that instead of reading the data from the plant's devices, he would read them from the same PC.
 
With one of the OPC UA Server SDK available on the market, a experienced programmer could develop what they ask for, only that instead of reading the data from the plant's devices, he would read them from the same PC.
Hi. Thanks for your comment. Do you think this is something people would buy if this would cost a few hundred dollars per runtime license?
 
For Siemens IPCs there is a product called Diagmonitor which amongst other things can publish PC diagnostics data to OPC UA:
https://mall.industry.siemens.com/mall/en/WW/Catalog/Products/10017303?activeTab=productinformation#

Costs a license though.

Not sure if it only works with Siemens IPCs.
Jesper, thanks very much for this information. I was unable to generate the datasheet for this product. It is unclear from the website whether the support is OPC or OPCUA, but I can trust your experience with Siemens that it is in fact OPCUA. As you point out, it is probably very specific to the Siemens industrial PC because it mentions features related to BIOS management. I was not able to see any price as I am registered only as a user (not disrtibutor) in the Siemens website, so have no access to pricing information. Do you happen to know roughly the list price for this software runtime license?

20210217_6ES7648-6CA85-1YX0_Siemens_DiagnosticsIPC.png
 
@Alfredo: No esta tan loco ese señor. That man is not crazy at all.
Thanks very much for your thoughts. It seems it is a concern that may be shared by hundreds if not thousands of administrators of SCADA systems around the world. I wonder what would be a number in US$ for a runtime license of an OPCUA server that would make accessible generic performance parameteters supported by the Windows 10 .NET framework, easily available as OPCUA nodes for automation engineers to easily add to their OPCUA client capable SCADA applications. Would a 100$ / workstation be too expensive? Or would people consider such a price tag an investment for the cost reduction and downtime reduction due to Windows 10 problems not detected in a timely basis due to lack of automated monitoring. Wondering out loud here..
 
Thanks, yes I am aware of this product that allows the OPC server to be an SNMP client so it can get SNMP object identifier values from things like routers, managed switches and of course any kind of Ethernet devices including Ethernet/IP, PROFINET IO devices, etc. It is pricey (over 500 US$), so not something for all SCADA machnines. What I have in mind is something much more simple which could cost a tenth, and which would only get information from its host Windows 10 workstation and have this diagnostic information about itself mapped to an OPC UA server running on itself. The OPCUA client could be local or remote. But, yes, this one SNMP-suite from Keptware and others is certainly useful for automation engineers for certain applications.
 
How about just using what the IT guys use (SNMP), but getting it served up as OPCUA tags?

I had a small setup using this on one site about 6 years ago.

https://www.kepware.com/en-us/products/kepserverex/suites/snmp-suite/

SNMP is reasonably easy if you have a MIB for a device. Windows PCs can run the SNMP agent to serve up info about the a machine.

I use this to get status from my Stratus Server.

I think the unease of using a commercial SNMP solution packaged for data centers may be what's now happened with SolarWinds. Granted, there are more players in the market, but it does add a layer of risk.

Thanks, yes I am aware of this product that allows the OPC server to be an SNMP client so it can get SNMP object identifier values from things like routers, managed switches and of course any kind of Ethernet devices including Ethernet/IP, PROFINET IO devices, etc. It is pricey (over 500 US$), so not something for all SCADA machnines. What I have in mind is something much more simple which could cost a tenth, and which would only get information from its host Windows 10 workstation and have this diagnostic information about itself mapped to an OPC UA server running on itself. The OPCUA client could be local or remote. But, yes, this one SNMP-suite from Keptware and others is certainly useful for automation engineers for certain applications.

500USD$ in a central location to cover all the machines in a network is a lot cheaper than your time to develop such application. The other issue that I would personally have is that anything custom made is bound to cost a lot more in the life of the asset than something pre-packaged and tested throughout.

Would an instance of Zabbix and what they advise in this post do?

https://blog.zabbix.com/zabbix-and-scada-who-watches-the-watchers/11117/

https://www.zabbix.com/forum/zabbix-cookbook/12201-monitoring-industrial-automation

Zabbix is free. I've tested it at home (downloaded their demo) and it was about a day's faffing around to get something out of it. They also have client software to install in the PCs that you'd want to monitor to collect the data you'd need.
 
Jesper, thanks very much for this information. I was unable to generate the datasheet for this product. It is unclear from the website whether the support is OPC or OPCUA, but I can trust your experience with Siemens that it is in fact OPCUA. As you point out, it is probably very specific to the Siemens industrial PC because it mentions features related to BIOS management. I was not able to see any price as I am registered only as a user (not disrtibutor) in the Siemens website, so have no access to pricing information. Do you happen to know roughly the list price for this software runtime license?
OPC UA is supported:
https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/de/en/view/109741042
List price is approx 200 €
 

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