Hi Kevin, Has the OPC A&C made it to the 8.3 roadmap?
A lot of SCADA systems offer A&E, customers request the interfaces. It would be a shame of it wouldn't be a part of Ignition in the near future..
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Yeah it’s planned. At this point it’s at risk of slipping from 8.3.0 to 8.3.x, but it’s planned.
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I really hope this gets prioritized because it will increase our production flexibility a lot. Will we get some new information about this new generic event infrastructure on ICC ?
I'm sure it'll be mentioned in the tech keynote, and the "Deeper Dive into 8.3: New Features" session on day 1 also mentions Event Streams.
I’d much much much prefer A&E support over the drawing tool! Comeon IA! I’ve been more than patient on this!
Hi Kevin, Is there any news on this?
It would really be a very useful feature to be able to incorporate A&C via OPC UA.
We're still planing to do this for 8.3, though it's at risk of slipping to 8.3.x instead of 8.3.0.
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Can IA not use a third-party A&E server as an optional module (like the OPC UA is integrated as a third-party module in Ignition) so that people can choose between Ignitions native alarms module and the third part A&E module? I know that native alarms module has many excellent features built into it but a third-party module will be more interoperable. This will meet the requirements of people who are absolutely dependent on OPC A&E specs.
This feature isn't really about alarms in Ignition, it's about alarms in other OPC UA servers and being able to get notified that an alarm condition in that server has triggered, via the OPC UA Events mechanism. Plus support for something like system.opcua.acknowledgeAlarm for when an Event happens to be an Alarm/Condition that you want to acknowledge from Ignition.
Alarms and Conditions in OPC UA are just a kind of Event.
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My understanding was that alarms within Ignition are also generated from OPC UA module withing Ignition which triggers alarms events that are used by an alarm module within Ignition or an OPC Client outside Ignition. I thought present Alarm module within Ignition does the alarm or event detection on its own by setting event triggers on Tags where alarms are defined. However, with OPC A&E, alarm limits only on OPC tags can be defined not for other alarms like in present Implementation in Ignition. I don't know! Honestly, I haven't ready the OPC A&E specs in detail, it was just my gut feeling.
Alarms have nothing to do with the OPC UA module.
I have the same use case as OP. Do we know yet if this is shipping in 8.3 or not?
It's not shipping in 8.3.0, but still planned for 8.3.x some time. This is sitting around position #1 in post-8.3.0 feature priority for the corresponding team.
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This drag on OPC UA A&C has easily been the biggest letdown for me on Inductive.. I’m sure 8.3 is gonna crush it!
But why this seeming dependence on the event streams? All I ever wanted was to get the alarms (alarm texts and all) from my UA server into Ignition alarms. Why would that need event streams? .
There's two parts to this:
- OPC UA events, for which the mapping to Event Streams should be obvious even if you don't actually know what event streams are yet. There's no other reasonable way to receive and react to OPC UA events in Ignition.
- OPC UA alarms, which are a specialization of OPC UA events.
Depending on what you mean by this you might need to temper your expectations. Alarms from an OPC UA server are never going to map directly to an Ignition alarm defined on some tag. What looks to be the plan is to do a custom AlarmQueryProvider implementation, which means Alarms from an OPC UA server will be queryable in Ignition's alarm status system, show up in the alarm status table, etc...
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Having the alams from the UA server show up in the alarm list / status is a long way from not having them at all 
The AlarmQueryProvider sounds like a good first step. If I'm reading you right it could be close to something like the alarm view in UA expert which shows active alarms with severity descriptions and all. https://www.unified-automation.com/products/development-tools/uaexpert.html. That and alarm logging would be end-game worthy. 
I'm imagining event streams as pipelines of actions from events, I don't know if that's on the right track or not.
It would be useful if you (and anyone else who reads this) could let us know what server product(s) you're using that support OPC UA Alarms.
So far the main third party server we're going to be testing/developing against will be the server in the Siemens S7-1500.
It's a Bosch-Rexroth CNC-controller in this case. It's rather expensive and rare so idk that I'd recommend adding it to your test-bench. Happy to facilitate a test if you'd be interested though.
Beckhoff OPCUA server for us
Thanks. I wonder if your Bosch-Rexroth PLC is Codesys-based like their ctrlX stuff.
I just recently got a Beckhoff XAE/XAR environment set up and running for working on our ADS implementation, shouldn't be too hard to get the OPC UA functionality installed when it comes time. Codesys again I think...
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