Factory Talk 7.0 - Server Status

[Santa10]

Hi,

Please could you assist in the following. Im not a guru as of yet in Factory talk and I have been asked to illustrate the Server Status of a Redundant Server as well as the historian server. The reason being is that they were only recently aware that both has been down since October last year. Is there anyway I could have the status of both server viewable in Factory Talk 7.0.

Thanks

Nick

[Santa10]

I need to be able to add the objects in factory Talk View SE, so that I can view if the redundant machine and historian server is online or offline.

[ASF]

Welcome to the forums! Do you have a Rockwell TechConnect contract? If so, there's a technote for this:

44624 - FactoryTalk View SE 5.x,6.x,7x, and 8x - Determine a server's current status and state using VBA
Access Level: TechConnect

You can download a display to show the current status of all your servers. I implemented this on a job last year. But be warned, it means a little bit of tinkering in VBA because (a) you have to change the names of your servers from their examples to your actual server names (not too difficult, as it's documented fairly well in the technote), and (b) the display they provide almost-kinda-mostly-sort-of works but not 100%. There's a few copy and paste errors and things forgotten. So you have to have enough of an understanding of VBA that you can work through it and get it working correctly.

It doesn't explicitly help you with the historian server, but it's a start, perhaps from there you can work on the Historian server as well?

[ASF]

I also added some logic into the VBA to set/reset some HMI tags dependant on server status, so I could bring up a warning banner and alarm if one or more of the servers went down

[Santa10]

Thanks for the reply ASF, we have a techconnect login. I will start playing around with it.

[ASF]

Good luck!

[crazedcanuck87]

Originally Posted by ASF

I also added some logic into the VBA to set/reset some HMI tags dependant on server status, so I could bring up a warning banner and alarm if one or more of the servers went down

ASF, could you give me an example of the code you used to set/reset the tags? Any help at all would be greatly apppreciated, i am a VBA beginner and just learning.

[ASF]

The code I used is in amongst a whole mass of VBA code that I'm not at liberty to share, and I don't have the time at the moment to go through and extract all the relevant bits. But in short:

1. Create a "VBA" display that starts up with the client and is always present. You can either use a display that is positioned off-screen so as to be invisible, or attach it to a display component that is always there, such as a navigation bar
2. Create a folder of tags in the "HMI Tags" section of your application to contain the server status tags. I called mine "ServerInfo". Then within that, I created subfolders for each server (primary, secondary, historian, directory) so that each folder had an identical tag structure
3. On your VBA display, define the tags on display animation start:

Public Sub Display_AnimationStart()
'Set up ServerStatus tags
If ServerStatusTags Is Nothing Then
    Set ServerStatusTags = Application.CreateTagGroup(Me.AreaName, 500)
    Set PrimServOK = ServerStatusTags.Add("ServerInfo\Primary\ServerOK")
    Set PrimServState = ServerStatusTags.Add("ServerInfo\Primary\State")
    Set SecServOK = ServerStatusTags.Add("ServerInfo\Secondary\ServerOK")
    Set SecServState = ServerStatusTags.Add("ServerInfo\Secondary\State")
    Set DirServOK = ServerStatusTags.Add("ServerInfo\Directory\ServerOK")
    Set DirServState = ServerStatusTags.Add("ServerInfo\Directory\State")
    Set ActiveServName = ServerStatusTags.Add("ServerInfo\ActiveServerName")
    Set ServAlarm = ServerStatusTags.Add("ServerInfo\ServerAlarm")
End If

4. You can then set and reset these tags in whatever way you want, using commands like:

If [primary server is OK] Then PrimServOK.Value = 1 Else: PrimServOK.Value = 0

5. Generate alarms based on the status of these HMI tags, or link them to your PLC and take other action - whatever you need to do

As to how you determine whether or not the server status is healthy - I used similar code to the code in the "server status" display above. That display has code to do things like "if server status is OK, make the box green and write 'Active' in it" and "if server is offline, make the box red and write 'Communication Error' in it". So you can pick through the VBA from that example from the knowledge base, and hopefully you can get enough detail out of it to do what you need to do.

Good luck!

[crazedcanuck87]

Many thanks ASF! You are a gentleman and a scholar!

[ASF]

You're welcome! One other thing that I just remembered - on display animation stop (i.e. at client shutdown), make sure to release the tags. I can't remember the exact syntax offhand but you should be able to find it in the help files or with a search of the forum. If you get stuck let me know and I'll see if I can dig it out