OPC Alarms & Events (A&E) and OPC UA Alarms & Conditions (A&C) Support

Access Alarm & Event/Condition Data in Other Systems, Integrate & Use It 

The OPC Alarms & Events (A&E) and it's OPC UA equivalent, Alarms & Conditions (A&C) are used to access information from HMI/SCADA/DCS and any system that is capable of generating Alarms or Events/Conditions and deliver it to alarm notification reporting & analysis software. The use of the open standard empowers users to use best-of-breed software instead of being limited to only one vendor's offerings. 

DataHub supports:

OPC Alarms & Events Capabilities

  • Receive/read data from multiple OPC A&E servers while acting as a client
  • Aggregate alarms from multiple sources
  • Serve alarm & event data as an OPC A&E server 
  • Deliver alarm data to databases, Excel, HMI's and more 

The most common use of DataHub's OPC A&E feature is for secure tunneling of alarm data between OPC A&E clients and servers over networks. 

The DataHub tunneling protocol operates over TCP/IP on a single user defined port, provides encryption & authentication, is proxy & DMZ friendly, auto-reconnects on network failure and provides indicators of network status so you interpret the data properly. 

Don't transmit and move your critical alarm data over networks without the resilience of DataHub.

OPC UA Alarms & Conditions Capabilities 

Perform the same functions that you can with OPC A&E but using the OPC UA Alarms & Conditions protocol with this feature. 

A common use of this feature is protocol conversion of OPC A&E to UA A&C or UA A&C to OPC A&E, as shown in the example on this page.

OPC UA A&C is available in DataHub V10 and higher.

OPC Protocol Conversion

OPC A&E or OPC UA A&C data is often of value to applications other than the alarm client.  It is also common to be using an alarm client that uses one version of the OPC alarms protocol only, and you need to connect to an alarm source using the other OPC alarm protocol.

DataHub makes this easy because all datapoints are maintained in a single unified dataset.  When a change comes in via one protocol, such as OPC A&E, the point(s) in the data set update, and if OPC UA A&C clients are connected to that dataset, they will automatically receive the data.  DataHub operates the same way if connecting to an OPC UA A&C server and sending the data to an OPC A&E client. 

Remember once the data is in DataHub, you can also log it, send it to spreadsheets, send email notifications, publish to an MQTT broker, and more. 

VIDEO TUTORIAL

Alarm & Event/Condition Aggregation with DataHub

Delivering a helpful and appropriate view of alarms requires bringing multiple alarm and event or condition sources together into a consolidated view.  When you aggregate into a common view you also reduce network traffic when multiple clients need the data. 

User Case Study: Large Scale Secure Alarm & Real-Time Data Networking 

See how Trans-Anatolian pipeline leverages the multiple OPC standard integration, redundancy, scripting, and secure tunneling capabilities of DataHub across an 1,850 kilometer pipeline to securely network data. The application uses various communications mediums and is seamlessly integrated with an ABB control and management systems.

Learn More About the Trans-Anatolian Application

Use Case: Alarm Centralization and A&E to UA A&C Conversion

  • Client needed to centralize Alarms and Events from multiple locations
  • Central collection site required use of OPC Alarms & Conditions (A&C)
  • Remote locations used OPC Classic Alarms & Events (A&E)
  • Solution:  DataHub with OPC A&E and A&C support as a gateway

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Alarm Collection Redundancy

It's common in critical systems to use redundant data paths to insure data communications. 

Combining DataHub's Redundancy capabilities with OPC A&E or UA A&C can deliver a robust result.

DataHub's Redundancy feature takes the incoming data from both OPC A&E servers into a DataHub instance acting as a Redundancy Broker. If one of the connections fails, the Datahub acting as the redundancy broker switches over so the client continues to receive data. Logic in the DataHub that you configure determines how and when a connection needs to failover to the backup and can do so very quickly.

Alarm Logging with DataHub

Another type of protocol conversion with DataHub is logging of data. You bring the data in via OPC A&E or OPC UA A&C and it's in the DataHub dataset.

Data can be extracted and logged to unique fields in the database as the Alarm or Event/Condition field is mapped to a hierarchical, organized dataset in DataHub. Don't waste time with systems that just log as a single block/string of text.

With the DataHub logging feature enabled you can log that data to any ODBC compliant SQL database where it's then accessible to other systems.  Combine this feature with alarm tunneling & aggregation for powerful applications. 

DataHub OPC A&E, OPC UA A&C Feature Licensing

The DataHub OPC A&E and OPC UA A&C features can be added on to any DataHub Solution Pack or included in any custom solution pack. 

The DataHub OPC A&E or OPC UA A&C features are typically combined with these other features. Some common applications of this feature are covered on the rest of this page

  • Networking & Tunneling
  • Redundancy
  • ODBC Logging
  • OPC DA/UA Protocol Conversion
  • MQTT to Cloud Brokers
  • Aggregation

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Get Started Now

This trial software is fully functioning and can be used to update licensed product provided you are on an active support & maintenance agreement.  Once DataHub is started it will run for 1 hour at a time, you can restart the application to reset this timer. Purchasing a license removes the limitation for licensed features. 

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