Gathering Communications Information

If you cannot establish communication with a device, check the following resources for evidence of a problem:

• Hardware alarms

• Plant SCADA log files

• Driver errors

• Runtime Kernel.

Hardware Alarms

When an error occurs in a Plant SCADA operation, a hardware alarm is generated. Hardware alarms are typically displayed on a dedicated page within a project, allowing an operator to monitor the status of a system's infrastructure.

Hardware alarms will indicate if break in communications has occurred, if Cicode can't execute, if a server becomes inoperative, and so on. If you are having problems communicating with a device, initially check the hardware alarms page for evidence of an error.

See Hardware Alarms in the topic Alarms.

Plant SCADA log files

Plant SCADA supports a number of log files that track operational status during runtime.

The primary log file, syslog.dat, contains a log of system information; from low-level driver traffic and Kernel messages, to user-defined messages.

The Log Read and Log Write fields in the I/O Devices Properties dialog determine if logging is enabled for each I/O device.

Driver logs are also available. These relate to the operation of a particular driver and are named accordingly. For example, the ABCLX driver is logged in 'ABCLX.dat'. However some driver logs may be in differing locations, refer to the help for a particular driver to confirm the location.

For a description of the available log files and where they are stored, see Log Files.

Driver errors

There are two types of driver errors that are logged to syslog.dat:

• Generic

• Driver-specific

Generic errors are common to many drivers, and are mapped to general hardware errors.

Driver-specific errors are unique to a particular driver. A driver will convert a specific error into a generic error so that it can be recognized by the hardware alarm system. However, if further investigation is necessary, you can refer to a description of the original error in the Driver Reference Help. This includes a description of the errors associated with each driver.

See Error Messages.

Runtime Kernel

The Runtime Kernel is a gateway into the internal workings of Plant SCADA at runtime, and is provided for diagnostics and debugging purposes.

The Kernel can display several different diagnostic windows each providing an active view of the Plant SCADA runtime system.

The Runtime Kernel Driver window, launched via the Page Driver Kernel command, displays information about each driver in the Plant SCADA system. The statistics it presents include read requests, physical reads, digital reads per second, register reads, cache reads, error count, timeouts, and so on.

See The Kernel.

See Also

Troubleshooting Device Communications