Background: At one of our job sites, daily reports are set to generate every night at 12:05am covering data from midnight to midnight. However, the data populates as "N/A" from 20:00 to midnight every day, with only the occasional report populating fully (maybe every 8-10 days.) The support for our reporting software tried a variety of tests and said that it appears that data is not present in the database at the time of the automatic report generation (12:05am), and think it is tied to the Store and Forward for the system.
I'm not very familiar with this feature in Ignition and haven't been able to glean much from the Help Manual that would help me solve this. We do not have the "Schedule" enabled so from my understanding the data should be forwarding at all times. Any ideas as to why this is not the case? I left all the settings on the Store and Forward as defaults. Or is it likely that something else is causing this problem? Thanks in advance!
It really does!! To try to rule the PC out, we also examined logs on the PC via Windows Event Viewer, and even checked screen saver settings, just for the heck of it.
And by the way, if we generate a report on-demand (during normal work hours, aka NOT at 12:05am), the data populates just fine on the report. So it gets to the database eventually. Which is why the reporting software suggested the store and forward for the system.
Any chance something is bogging the database down during that time period every day? (If the data gets there eventually, it suggests the S&F is working perfectly.)
As a starting point, consider monitoring the [System] tags for Local Cache, also Memory Buffer.
One option, create a couple of new memory tags with the following expressions (pick the correct tags from the tag picker):
Thanks for the suggestion!! I just set things up according to @Chris_Bingham's suggestion and will monitor those tags for the next couple days to see if it gives me any leads. I'll let you know how it goes!
Quick follow up! I tried gleaning some info on the local cache and memory buffer per @Chris_Bingham 's suggestion but that didn't reveal anything.
I decided to change the time the reports auto-generate, and every hour I selected past midnight eliminated a row of N/A values, so that now if I set the reports to auto-generate at 5am or later, data populates the reports just fine.
This is a "good enough" fix for the site for now, however, it still doesn't explain why there is a 4-hr data lag before midnight specifically. If anyone else encounters a similar issue even months or years later, please let me know! This is a very unsatisfying conclusion.
Can you share what "the support for our reporting software" is? Are you using the reporting module in Ignition or some external system? I have seen expressions for querying start date and end date in reports that don't take into account the timezone of the ignition server or sql database. Perhaps if you could share details of the query, we can help pinpoint the problem. I know that personally, I run reports around 3 or 4 am to allow any daylight savings time shifts to occur (and dealing with different timezones of remote sites) to take effect. I know you said that running on-demand reports works fine, but that means you are sending different start/end times. Remember that the designer and running project can run in a different timezone than the gateway. And the scheduled reports are working on the gateway's clock.
Where is the data coming from? If an Edge gateway, there could also be a schedule for which the remote gateways send their S&F data (via Remote History Sync Settings).
Edit: Never mind, the above wouldn't amount to:
Otherwise, I vote +1 for a time-zone issue (either the data is not being inserted with correct Unix timestamp, or reporting engine is not interpreting the time stamp correctly?)
