DNP3 Event buffer backfill

Ignition
1

Hi, I can’t find much info on the DNP3 driver in Ignition in terms of what parts of the DNP3 protocol have been implemented. One important feature that is a necessity for all of our water projects is the DNP3 event buffer backfilling of data, and it’s something that has seen the majority of our municipal water bodies use ClearSCADA over any other SCADA system for its DNP3 capabilities. Is this something that has been implemented in the current Ignition DNP3 driver?

Where can I find more info on what’s been included in the driver? For example, I’m also interested if it implements the WITS standard too (http://www.witsprotocol.org/).

Cheers,
Nick

2

No, it doesn’t do backfill or event history/replay right now.

There’s a chance this will be implemented in Ignition 8.0 but it’s more likely to be 8.1. It won’t happen any sooner than 8.0 because part of implementing it relies on new OPC UA client/server configuration options that will be possible in 8.0.

I’ve heard of WITS before but it’s not on the roadmap right now. I’ll try to take another look at it soon.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the info. I’ll be waiting out for this addition so that we can hopefully start pushing Ignition into our water industry customers :slight_smile:

4

Kepware offers drivers for both, but I understand people tend to prefer the all-in-one single-vendor solution these days…

5

If using Kepware though, this wouldn’t handle writing buffered event data into the SQL database in the Ignition format though… would it?

6

(The way I understand it) Kepware handles backfill by entering some kind of “replay” mode where it slowly (on some configurable interval, I think) replays the values one-by-one in the server, which means clients subscribed to those nodes should receive the value changes one-by-one as well, with the appropriate timestamps.

In Ignition all you’d need to do is enable history on the tag and tell it to use the server timestamp. When backfilling starts, the tag should receive values one-by-one and they’ll get recorded like any other value change.

1 Like
7

Hmm, when you say ‘with appropriate timestamps’, I read this as: the historic logging would include the correct timestamps as recorded by the outstation.
E.g. If comms was lost to a DNP3 outstation at 10 AM and re-established at 11 AM, the events logged (with timestamps, e.g. 10:03:32 AM, 10:24:02 AM, 10:34:30 AM, etc.) into the outstation buffer during this time will ‘replay’ via Kepware into Ignition which would log these historic data points with these outstation timestamps.

Is that correct?

8

That's how it all works in my head :slight_smile:

Kepware offers a free 2-hour re-settable trial, you should test it out and see if it does what you need.