Learn about trends

While browsing elements in PI System Explorer, you can quickly create simple trends to verify the formulas, calculations, and other measurements you are building within PI AF. For example, while you are designing a PI AF formula, you might want to see what the results look like over the last several hours. Or, if you are creating PI point attributes that involve summaries, it could be useful to see what those look like over recent hours.

You can add the PI AF attributes or PI points of interest to a trend; one way of adding them is to drag and drop them onto the trend. You can then explore the data by adjusting the duration and the start and stop times of the trend.

After you have created the trend, it remains available in the Trend window even when you are using other features within PI System Explorer. You can add or remove traces to the trend at any point. You can also right-click the trend cursor and select commands from a context menu.

You can also see a trend of an attribute when you view its time series data (by right-clicking an attribute and clicking Time Series Data). The trend is automatically shown at the bottom of the Time Series Data window.