Two wish list items - OPC support and a discovery tool

greyhat64 · Post by **greyhat64** » Wed May 07, 2008 4:19 pm

Similar to SNMP, OPC provides a common interface for industrial automation and enterprise systems. It would be very cool if HM could act as an OPC client and monitor OPC tags presented by an available OPC server.

See http://www.opcconnect.com/opcintro.php for more information.

There are a number of free OPC toolkits and source code as well as free clients, servers and utilities available at this site and others.

As for my other wishlist item, the Replicator tool is a terrific timesaver, but wouldn't it be nice to have a tool that would scan a device and, based on device type, present the available resources to monitor in a selection list, and auto-configure the basic test.

This idea has application in the OPC realm as well, since the OPC tags can be queried by the OPC client - similar to a MIB browser for SNMP.

Your thoughts. . .

KS-Soft · Post by **KS-Soft** » Thu May 08, 2008 7:05 pm

As for my other wishlist item, the Replicator tool is a terrific timesaver, but wouldn't it be nice to have a tool that would scan a device and, based on device type, present the available resources to monitor in a selection list, and auto-configure the basic test.

Yes, we plan to implement such tool in the future.

Similar to SNMP, OPC provides a common interface for industrial automation and enterprise systems. It would be very cool if HM could act as an OPC client and monitor OPC tags presented by an available OPC server.
See http://www.opcconnect.com/opcintro.php for more information.

Thank you for suggestion. We will think about OPC...

Regards
Alex

greyhat64 · Post by **greyhat64** » Sat May 10, 2008 12:02 am

I look forward to seeing the discovery tool - how soon do you think we'll see this?

As for OPC, for you it's inclusion will open an whole new market (PLC, SCADA) in both industrial and utilities markets that is, to my knowledge, completely untapped by any other conventional network monitoring tool. For me personally it allows us to consolodate our alarms to one platform - yours.

And I've been told it's very easy to implement. Maybe by v7.5

KS-Soft · Post by **KS-Soft** » Mon May 12, 2008 1:00 pm

I look forward to seeing the discovery tool - how soon do you think we'll see this?

May be in version 9

As for OPC, for you it's inclusion will open an whole new market (PLC, SCADA) in both industrial and utilities markets that isAnd I've been told it's very easy to implement. Maybe by v7.5

May be

Regards
Alex

greyhat64 · Post by **greyhat64** » Thu May 15, 2008 12:40 pm

If you're looking for incentive, I just ran across Network World's Best of 2008.
BTW - You guys should post your product for them to review. I'm sure you would rank high. At the same time, there's nothing wrong with learning from the competition.

The most glowing thing that they had to say about one competitor's product,

It quickly and accurately discovered applications, servers, devices and services on part or all of a network. Even more impressive was its ability to group the results by IP address or domain name and to suggest what to monitor more closely.

This feature obviously ranks high, at least for the testers at NW magazine, myself, and I'm sure a number of other interested users.
Might that move it up to v8?

KS-Soft · Post by **KS-Soft** » Fri May 16, 2008 9:23 am

Might that move it up to v8?

May be but I am not sure

Regards
Alex

Java-Jim · Post by **Java-Jim** » Mon Oct 13, 2008 12:21 am

A new testmethod for OPC Server would be great for our customers.

greyhat64 · Post by **greyhat64** » Mon Oct 13, 2008 9:11 am

Java-Jim,
Good to hear that I'm not the only one with OPC needs!

I'm not sure if it's OPC or the aforementioned discovery tool that has generated so many hits on this topic. Both would certainly help me.
I've been giving thought to writing my own callable routine to plug into HM. There appears to be enough opensource documentation and sourcecode to give it a try.
If you would like to work together on this, let me know, I'm now available via email on this forum.

KS-Soft · Post by **KS-Soft** » Wed Nov 19, 2008 2:34 pm

There is command line utility that may request OPC server, retrieve value of specified item and compare this value to some number or string
http://www.ks-soft.net/download/utils/opccheck.zip

This utility can be used by Shell Script test method
http://www.ks-soft.net/hostmon.eng/mfra ... m#chkShell

Regards
Alex

greyhat64 · Post by **greyhat64** » Wed Nov 19, 2008 2:53 pm

WOO HOO!

I'll give it a try & report the results as soon as possible.

KS-Soft Europe · Post by **KS-Soft Europe** » Tue Feb 24, 2009 3:39 am

greyhat64 wrote:I'll give it a try & report the results as soon as possible.

Have you tried OPCCheck utility already? Does it work? Could you try it please?

Regards,
Max

greyhat64 · Post by **greyhat64** » Tue Feb 24, 2009 10:08 am

I haven't yet and haven't had an opportunity to give it a try. Our own OPC utility has been doing the job for us till now, so there's been no big incentive, but it certainly would be nice to capture these alarms and log them with everything else that HM does.

I may try to throw up a couple of simple tests, but it will be at least two weeks before I can spend any real time with it. Sorry.

Regards,
Joel

KS-Soft · Post by **KS-Soft** » Tue Feb 24, 2009 1:25 pm

Don't worry. We thought you are using this test for production monitoring, in such case your experience could prompt us to make some changes or improvements in the test...

Regards
Alex

greyhat64 · Post by **greyhat64** » Tue Feb 24, 2009 1:31 pm

Not using it in production yet - but soon I hope!
Thanks for making it available as an option.

kasi · Post by **kasi** » Wed Mar 11, 2009 8:22 am

anybody using opccheck utility?

KS-Soft wrote:Don't worry. We thought you are using this test for production monitoring, in such case your experience could prompt us to make some changes or improvements in the test...

Regards
Alex