Geo SCADA Expert Ideas

I was at a customer site a week or two back and the customer asked if it was possible to historize string and time points yet.  They've been long time users so me breaking the news that it wasn't possible wasn't really the end of the world.  That said, it would be nice if this was possible.  The use case would be for storing enumerations for values that go beyond what a 3 bit discrete can provide today.  We commonly run into situations where an analog value has to be used to bring back a value of 1-x where the value represents a first out.  We'd use ST or a calc point to push the string enumeration for what it means to a string point, but the string point is never historized.  If we ever had to go back and figure out what it was, we'd have to pair up the history with an enumeration table in order to make life easier. ... View more

We have several customers with very large SCADA systems that are worked on by multiple integrators. We have a test/dev system setup and on the network with a production setup. We do our development on the test system and then export our changes and import on the production system.   This usually goes well and without much trouble. However, if some integrators don't follow a proper change management procedure (e.g. updating a template on test but forgetting to update it on production) then the two databases will drift over time. In an effort to reduce our admin and change management workload it would be excellent to be able to develop and test on the dev system and then have a "promote changes to prod" feature.   As an extension of this process it would be good for the system to evaluate parent objects (templates, embedded mimics) for changes and publish those to production before publishing any inherited objects. This could have a dialogue box similar to the delete dialogue. "Publishing to production will impact the following objects and make the following changes:" and list the impacted objects with the parent objects first and inherited objects last.    Further expansion on the idea: have the ability to have a configuration field to prevent publishing certain objects. There are some cases where we always want test/production objects to be different. E.g. communications settings, system headers, etc.. ... View more

There are  two ways of enabling/disabling a ClearSCADA object: either by setting it in/out of service or by invoking the EnableExecution/DisableExecution method.   It is easy to track out of service logic by querying the InService property. However, there is no corresponding OPC property to easily track if a logic object has its execution disabled but still in service. You can only see it on an individual basis by looking at the Status dialog for a particular logic object.   The best workaround I have found so far is querying the Foreground property and checking if it matches the System Colour for 'Program Disabled' that has been set in the server settings. However, it is pretty clunky and not exactly robust. Being able to query this directly would make it more reliable when trying to search for disabled logic on a SCADA system. ... View more

  I want to convert a customer's Allen Bradley PLC points to Ethernet/IP and eliminate the OPC server that is using Ethernet/IP, however they have quite a few PLCs that have DF1 addresses like N16:11/16 and Geo SCADA's driver doe not support those.   In the OPC server's driver that DF1 identifier ends up being 'usable' via CIP because CIP allows for tunneling of other data, so DF1 can be encapsulated within a CIP message.  It's called PCCC. Thanks @BevanWeiss for explaining this to me.   So it would be great if PCCC support was added to the Ethernet/IP driver so more Allen Bradley PLCs can be communicated to directly. ... View more

We often don't want the geospatial map to be the only view. It would be good if it was possible to embed such a map within an existing mimic. ... View more

As per the email exchange with Amy Anger, it would be ideal to have the ability to access bits in the EtherNet/IP analog point tag field as possible in an OPC - Advanced analog point.  This would allow for clients who use DINTs to package information in their systems fully transition to Geo SCADA smoothly.    ... View more

A few of our customers have web applications that are closely related to their SCADA systems, but are still separate. This is for things like 'Asset Management Systems', 'Service Request / Work Order Ticket Systems', 'Alarm Analysis Systems', 'Alarm Instruction Systems'   At the moment we are launching an external web browser session for each of these, but many of them would be 'nicer' if they remained within the SCADA environment entirely, and didn't disrupt the display of SCADA data (i.e. by popping up over SCADA data, or by taking over the entire SCADA display window).   It would be ideal if it was possible to have an embedded display, within an existing Mimic, that could show a web page, with the URL of the webpage able to be driven by an animation / script action, OR by action within the embedded web page (i.e. if just clicking a hyperlink within the web page). ... View more

It would be really neat to see the OPC server object have a checkbox for something like Block Controls or Ignore Writes.  The use case for this is when there's a production system and a second system (QA or Dev) pointed to the same OPC server.  You can have the OPC server object in QA configured to ignore writes that way all other features continue to function without impeding with production data.  Often times we have customers who want to see values updating in development or QA to replicate load and other things.   We could use server denied permissions and block control, but we still want logic and ST to continue to work so I'm not sure there's a workaround for it. ... View more

I'd like to see some options like Align left, align right, align top, align bottom when building mimics.    To take it to the max, think of PowerPoint and how when resizing or dragging it'll do some calculations and tell you where the even distance between objects would be and also indicate when resizing when you've reached the border of an object on the same layer.    And for the folks who love to resize things and never make them the same size, multi select --> make same size.  I cannot tell you how much this one triggers me.  Folks will use the same embed, resize them independently and nothing is the same.  Then when they align them, half of them don't snap to the grid because they decided to hold alt when resizing.   Make same size --> align left.    I can't tell you how elated I and many others would be for such a simple thing. ... View more

The geospatial maps are good, but they could be much better.   One such request would be if the icons could be customised so that they aren't just picked from a list of triangle, square, diamond.. and then a circle..   It should be possible to specify any Unicode character, OR an SVG icon to be provided, and this should be possible to animate (as an index into a map icon table object perhaps) via the map query (i.e. so that if a pump is running we can use a certain icon vs if it's not).  ... View more

ClearSCADA / Geo SCADA Expert already has a nice OPC-DA (and OPC-HDA) tunnelling capability through the ClearSCADA / Geo SCADA Expert Data Access Components (and Configure Connections etc). However...   It would be even nicer (in a cross-platform manner) if Geo SCADA Expert was also able to act as a native OPC-UA server (the same way it currently does for OPC-DA etc).  It should align nicely with the existing database structure, and with the security model etc.  So there should be limited complications.   It would allow for additional integration with platforms like Node-RED etc. ... View more

I think it's time that Geo SCADA Expert got an OPC-UA driver to allow it to retrieve data from OPC-UA servers. ... View more

Often when making mimics, we want to have something which is coloured and styled the same as an existing Alarm Severity, i.e. we will want a symbol which represents an alarm condition that would be the colour of the High Severity, and would blink like the High Severity, etc etc.   At the moment we have to manually configure items in the database, or have something which automatically retrieves these from an SQL query on the CSeverity table... but this is a bit horrible.   What would be nice is if there was a set of OPC properties related to each of the configured Alarm Severities, perhaps something like a #Severities.{Severity Description}.Foreground... etc for each of the style items. ... View more

It would be really nifty if the List Box objects included some visual GUI cues that showed which columns were sorted and which columns were filtered. This way a user can know quickly which columns are contributing to their view.    Excel does this with Tables, showing the filter with a funnel icon and a sort with an up or down arrow.  ... View more

We've had a number of customers start to utilise the Azure platform for more data analysis, including ingress of larges amounts of IoT data.   This poses a problem of trying to easily connect real time data from the existing OT platforms, like Geo SCADA Expert up into the Azure platform.   I envisage this would be a driver, in a similar fashion to the Wonderware Historian driver currently, where points would be allocated to the Azure Connector, and would then be pushed as a data stream to the configured Azure Event Hub endpoint.   Some amount of rate limiting should be allowed for (to keep the Event Hub load below a configured limit.. which I believe is typically procured in capacity unit allotments where 1 such unit can handle 1MB/s or 1000 events/s whichever occurs first), with a configurable high water mark alarm (e.g. if the connector has buffered > 10MB of data then an alarm occurs) as well as a maximum buffering time alarm (e.g. if the connector has been in a buffering mode for > 2 hours then an alarm occurs).     As a System Integrator we'd like to be able to develop such a connector for our clients, however the Simple DDK doesn't allow for this access to the historical data streams across the whole database, nor does the .NET API. ... View more

In the same way that it's possible to add a custom menu option to the Alarm Banner context sensitive menu, an useful feature to GeoScada would be execute an specific script directly in the map by adding a menu option to the map context sensitive menu.    The feature is included in the Alarm Banner by using the Global Script and the sentence "AlarmBanner.AddMenuItem"   It's a simple idea but it would potentialize the use of the maps feature into the Scada   Please let me know if this short idea could be implemented soon.    Thanks ... View more

Currently the highest Alarm Severity and Alarm State will inherit upwards through their parent groups but these values have no effect on the group Foreground color. I think it would be extremely convenient to either have Foreground color and Blink reflect the groups alarm state and severity or have another field all together that reflects it (something like 'CurrentAlarmColor').   For example, we have a template that contains multiple discrete alarms and a few analog alarms but we only have a simple analog mimic to show the current process value. We would like the border to reflect the alarm severity and state via color and blinking. In order to achieve this currently, we would either need to check the foreground color of all alarming points (not fun), or use the severity of the parent group in a nested IIF statement to decide a color. The issue with the latter is not having access to the configured alarm severity colors so you would now need to make your own colors (not ideal). I know a suggestion has been made for the latter and I hope it is approved but I would still love to be able to assign the border a color of ".Foreground" and a blink of ".Blink" and call it a day.  This could also be used when dividing the plant areas into groups and wanting the menu buttons to light up with the highest severity alarm in that area.   Let me know if anyone has any better suggestions! Would love to hear some feedback. ... View more

I've been thinking about sparklines as seen in other software packages and how to recreate them within Geo SCADA without taxing the system.  I can easily mock up an embed that has the last X minutes of data in a sparkline type object, but the issue with a fixed embed becomes "what if the user wants to see 1hr and X ticks in that hour?".  The flexibility, at least in my head, isn't there with a fixed object since it'll have a defined number of ticks.  Maybe I just have to think outside of the box a bit more to get it flexible to handle time and ticks as a parameter.   We can embed a trend with a transparent background, but that's not really a good solution either and would require a trend to be built for pretty much every single point we'd want this on.   Sparklines on a tank or inlet/outlet/critical pressure would be a great addition.  ... View more

Another quality of life item for Geo SCADA Expert ViewX.   We have a few customers with multiple systems that ViewX connects to. It appears that when these systems are configured to have auto logoff on idle, that even if these are all configured the same (i.e. 15 minutes) that when the logoff occurs the operators have to individually log into each system.   As we co-ordinate usernames/passwords, this means that they often have to enter the same username/password up to 5 times in a row.  This results in complaints. What would be good is if it could consolidate multi systems to log back in with just a single username/password prompt (similar to what is available when manually logging into ViewX). ... View more