Hey, I usually search the site for B&R issues a few times a month since this place is pretty light on B&R users to see if I can help out. bitmonkey is absolutely right that you can get most of the status information from SDM and as a non-B&R user, this will be much easier for you than using Automation Studio. Without training, I don't think there is anything more usefull you're going to get from Automation Studio anyway.
If you do want to connect with AS, you'd typically open the Configuration tab, then expand the Motion folder for the active configuration and open up the NC mapping file (typically Acp10map.ncm). This is a list of all the configured servo and SDC axes in the project and you can right click on any of them to open a test, watch, or trace window. The test window is a combination of the trace and watch windows that also allows you to issue commands and change parameters for each axis (it also get's ****y if you go on and offline). The watch window is where you can check things like the axis position, current status, the state of any IO, etc. The trace window is where you would chart position/velocity/motor temp/etc. Pretty much any of a few hundred parameters can be traced.
The AS help has information on every drive parameter as well as some info about the logical control structure of a servo axis and the state machine diagrams. B&R uses NC actions as its most basic motion control level and these are almost completely hidden now by the wrapper functions of PLCopen. They have released Mapp motion also, but that is on few projects at the moment. It is an alternative to PLCopen that is still compatible with PLCopen (it also uses NC actions under the hood to command the motion).
