Monitoring and notifying of "bad status" tag values in TopView

Monitoring and notifying of "bad status" tag values in TopView

Monitored data points can often have a "bad status", which is an indication that the value of a tag in TopView may not be reliable.

You may want to detect bad statuses in TopView and notify people when they are present.

Recommended practices:
  1. Do not "OR" the bad status condition ("?") with another alarm condition. OR'd alarm conditions require mutually exclusive conditions to ensure alarm states transitions are consistent.
  2. If you do not want alarms when a tag has a bad status value, use the "Check for Good Status" option in the tag's Alarm Limits and Notifications settings to prevent alarms from occurring when a status is bad.
Here are two options for detecting bad statuses in TopView:
  1. Detect individual bad statuses:
    1. Create a row for the tag and set the alarm condition to "?" (bad status).
    2. You can then configure tag group, or individual tag, notifications for this alarm.
    3. This will allow detection of individual bad status alarms and allow your notification to specify the exact tag with issues.
  2. Detect bad statuses in aggregate:
    1. Monitor "bad status" in the aggregate by adding the TopView Status Tag "statusnotgood_count" to your configuration, which returns the number of tags with bad status values in the current configuration.
    2. You can alarm when this count is non-zero and configure notifications for this alarm. This setup allows you to monitor bad status issues using fewer tags and a simpler configuration, but may not provide exact information about which tag has a bad status in the notification.
    3. To determine which rows are in bad status, use a TopView client like Remote Viewer, or go to Values View in TopView Admin Tools overview page for the configuration.


    • Related Articles

    • Keeping TopView healthy

      Like all software, TopView is running in an environment that is under constant change. OS updates, protocol versions updates, email authentication deprecations, and other things can affect the health of your TopView system. Even systems off the ...
    • OPCUA tag search - returned tag format

      If you experience issues with full Browse Paths being unable to be resolved by TopView's OPC UA tooling, you have other options to return Node IDs or browse paths combined with Node IDs from TopView's "Add tags"/ tag search dialog. In TopView 7.2 and ...
    • Why are Boolean values not alarming?

      When using the equals condition ("=") for any type of incoming value, TopView looks for exact matches. Set the alarm conditions to match the values from the data source. TopView does not make assumptions about how to interpret Boolean signals, ...
    • Counting points for TopView licenses

      TopView licenses are mainly based upon the number of points monitored by TopView. You can run multiple TopView configurations (The TopView Window, Alarm and Notification Engine) at the same time. The total points in use is the sum of the points ...
    • TopView engine unable to connect to OPC UA server: SHA 1 Certificates are not trusted

      Issue The TopView engine was unable to connect to the OPC UA server due to certificate issues. When inspecting the logs, we could see similar error messages to those that would occasionally appear when testing connections. This issue may show as the ...