ping an IP address

[JWayda]

I am working on a mashup and one of the things we would like to display is if a factory floor machine is up. We would like to determine this by pinging the IP address of the machine. We would also like to use this process to check the status for other devices that are on the factory floor.

Is there any way to have a mashup ping an IP address? If so, where can I find information on how to do this. If not, what are some options people have used to try to determine if a machine / device is reachable? 

I don't have much Thingworx experience and apologize if this is something that has been answered before.

Thanks,

John

[jensc · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I realize this isn't much, but there is a support article related to this here.

It was all I could find. But perhaps someone else will have more information. 

Regards,

Jens

[JWayda]

Thanks for the links. I am going to work on a custom extension for what we are looking to do.

[Sathishkumar_C]

I believe, you can develop your own custom extension with ping request. Sample code in Java.

[JWayda]

Thanks for this link, This was something that I had seen and am using as a guide for the custom extension I am working on. 

[Sathishkumar_C]

This might be helpful for you.

https://github.com/sathishkumarc14/TWX_PingRequest

[geva]

Many people accomplish this sort of use case by simply having a heartbeat tag in the PLC that is communicated through Kepware to ThingWorx.  You can then monitor this tag from ThingWorx and watch when it last arrived, what the time drift is, if it is reporting up-to-date or catching up old data.  I made a video about this including some ThingWorx resources you'll find in the video description.

Ideally you should have as much of your ThingWorx application function with data that it already has, as any request like this will take time and have scalability and maintenance considerations.  For example if your I.T. all of a sudden blocks ICMP, your pings will stop working and you'll think that you PLCs are down.  This is why I'm monitoring the PLCs using the telemetry channel as any sort of breakdown of that channel will mean that ThingWorx can fire an alarm.  With a ping, you could still have a Kepware configuration problem which wouldn't tell you that the communication to that PLC had stopped flowing.

We also advise the use of extensions to be thoughtfully reflected as they will then need to be tested and managed overtime as you upgrade the platform.