let me be more sepcific.
As an Automation Engineer What are the Routine Maintenance Activity you would carry out ( Dairy Plant) with more than 30 PLC and 20plus HMI cleint, with 2 centralised IO server and 5-6 Individual server, Historian.
Apart from all the backup stuff, I would:
- ensure there was an engineering alarm area, and monitor those alarms. This would be on a daily basis, say beginning of the day.
- monitor the hard drive space on all computer/servers.
- monitor the network speeds (if available).
- if a proper tool is available, trend the communication counters on the switches for malformed packets or errors on the ports. Normally you'll have a baseline measurement and if one starts deviating from it, you can do something to avoid going into fault.
- depending on the type of historian, move the data from the historian to external storage.
- clean the computers/servers, no matter how clean the room is or how many filters you have, the servers will gather some dust inside. It's worth keeping tabs on the accumulation rate and act accordingly. Before doing this, though, be sure to get pictures of every little setting of the BIOS in the servers/clients.
- This is part of the process engineers duties, but I would also launch a alarm review meeting on a weekly basis to work out nuisance alarms and push forward important alarms during processing hours to be analysed. Operators tend to forget about these things...
Nowadays you can get applications like Nagios or Zabbix to monitor the network devices via SNMP (and there are also comms drivers for SNMP to interface with SCADA).