Back in 2003 I heard Emerson was going to run some sort of utility on my client's site as part of the foundation support.
Is this utility available to non-Emerson personnel?
I'm interested in one of the features I heard it would perform - providing a listing of all peer-to-peer references.
We have a client who wants to quantify how many control loops in an existing plant are split between two DeltaV controllers.
I'm aware this information can be obtained from user defined exports and data mining, I just hoped it could be obtained easier than that, so we could run it at several locations.
Any knowledge would be appreciated - CHris
Chris, I checked with the support team and here's what they passed along back to me:
"The only thing is the registration utility that’s built into DeltaV, which will pull all of the hardware and licensing data from the system – this is what feeds the Guardian dashboard. What it will not do is pull any configuration data."
If you want to suggest it as an enhancement, here is a link to the User Defined Enhancement Program.
Chris,
A few years ago I had Sure Service do a study for an upgrade and they used a tool to aid them with that. It found all the peer-to-peer connections that were formally referenced, and it identified the expressions where there might be dynamic references and potential issues with status handling. I am certain that the tool is not available outside of Emerson, but I would guess that the Sure Service team could run that analysis on the system for you.
Aaron
In reply to Aaron Crews:
I wonder if the Controller Redundancy Analyser Program might not provide the information needed. This utility was provided on DeltaV media and used to verify how the peer to peer configurations were done in order to identify expressions and other references that crossed controller boundaries. I believe this ran against the FHX export file.
There is an "unsupported" utility on DeltaV systems called the ROCDiagnosticsExplorer. This utility allows you to view the active connections between nodes, and will list the modules and their parameters. You would need to only look at connections between controllers. It is unsupported in that it is not intended for the end user and is not somthing you can call the GSC about. But it installs on every DeltaV workstation and can be launched from the Windows Run Menu. I'd suggest the following:
- From ROCDiagnosticsExplorer, look under each controller to find the list of Proxy Client modules sending data to this node.
- From DeltaV Explorer, go to the modules and view References. This will list the database references to the module and show you where the module references are created.
Andre Dicaire
In reply to Andre Dicaire:
Thank you all for the information. It is greatly appreciated. We'll give the ideas a try. A co-worker already brute forced the immediate need with FHX exports, vbscript and database queries.
In reply to Chris Hoffpauir:
A few years back, I wrote a utility to do just what you are asking for. It reads an FHX file and generates a CSV file with all the references that span more than one controller. I have not run it in a couple of years so if you are using a newer version of DeltaV, it might need to be updated. It does not try to analyze dynamic references but if you are interested, let me know and I can email it to you.