OPC Alarms & Events or workaround

[Rutger]

Dear All,

This question has passed before, but is there any connectivity solution between OPC Alarms & Events and ThingWorx 8.5 or 9.x in the meantime?

We need some alarms from our devices and would save a lot of work if we were able to use OPC AE.

Or maybe somebody has created a workaround?

Kind regards,

Rutger

[wcui]

Hi  Rutger

Can you give more details about OPC Alarms & Events and your use-case? 

Are you using Kepware to connect OPC device then forward PLC data to Thingworx(TW)?

As I know, TW supply Event and Alarm functions with thing where Kepware data were bound.

[Rutger]

Hi @wcui,

Thank you for your reply.

We use KEPServerEX for collecting data from our PLC's. KEPServerEX is connected with ThingWorx.

In general we have PLC's that generate there alarms within the PLC. This data is collected by the OPC als Booleans. Within Thingworx we use 'Alerts' to create an alarm and add it to the TW Alarmstream.

But there are also some additional values we want to alert, for example a temperature that is above x dgrC.

You could use the same Alert functionality of a Thing for this, but you can't use hysteresis to prevent unwanted on/off alarming.

Also we have another application we have to provide with some alarms. So it would be great if there is a way to use OPC A&E as a central alarm handling system.

Now we use Advanced Tags for generating these alarms with an hysteresis as a workaround, but OPC A&E is far more suitable for these kind of functionalities.

[wcui]

Hi Rutger

Kepware supply OPC AE plug-in which support configuring alarms using device data and sends an event to OPC AE clients. Below is the manual, can you take a look?

https://www.kepware.com/en-us/products/kepserverex/advanced-plug-ins/alarms-events/documents/alarm-events-manual.pdf

[Rutger]

Hi @wcui,

Thank you for your input. I'm aware of the OPC A&E plug-in and think it can be very useful for us. But the main question is in what way can we connect OPC A&E to ThingWorx? It looks like you can't get the alarms and events in ThingWorx. 

Or is there a way? It would be very helpful if we can solve this because the alarm management functionality we use in ThingWorx is still an issue.

Kind regards,

Rutger

[wcui]

Hi Rutger, unfortunately this is not possible to connect Kepware OPC A&E to ThingWorx because for TW to ingest the data, an OPC A&E Client is required. 

In that case, you will have to develop your own A&E client and find a suitable way to bridge that into ThingWorx. 

[wcui · Accepted solution]

Hi Rutger, unfortunately this is not possible to connect Kepware OPC A&E to ThingWorx because for TW to ingest the data, an OPC A&E Client is required. 

In that case, you will have to develop your own A&E client and find a suitable way to bridge that into ThingWorx. 

[Rutger]

Hi wcui,

I was already afraid about that. We will look into the A&E client development, thank you.

I will mark this post 'Accept as Solution' to close this topic, although we have no suitable solution yet.

Kind regards,

Rutger