This is more of a general OPC-UA functionality versus a Ignition feature, but how does the UA spec address what was OPC AE, and how does Ignition treat A&E type data? Does Ignition end up handling alarming and logs with the actual A&E timestamps?
So, the “U” in OPC-UA stands for “Unified”. What they mean by this is that they unified the old DA, A&E and HDA specs into a single spec.
With that being said, not every OPC-UA application supports all part of the UA spec. They tried to clarify this with the idea of different “Profiles” that carve up the UA spec into subsets, but this hasn’t caught on too much.
Anyhow, long story short: The A&E stuff is included in UA, but Ignition doesn’t use any of it. (We may in the future, though)
There are products in general use in the Pharma industry that use classic OPC. An example is the UNICORN software from Cytiva. This software services OPC DA, OPC A&E, and OPC HDA. The A&E tags are very important, from a factory monitoring and control perspective.
What is the recommended method for gaining access to these A&E tags in Ignition 8.1?
Something like this might work, which claims to be able to convert OPC Classic A&E into OPC UA, but I don’t know whether they’re turning it into regular “tag” data that we can access or if they’re translating into the OPC UA equivalent of A&E - Alarms and Conditions, which we don’t support either.