Trace Viewer Application

Use the Trace Viewer application to monitor the content and parameters of driver messages and VTScada-related network traffic as it occurs. Depending on the license you purchased with VTScada, up to five sources of information are available. The collected data is also logged to standard Access database files for later viewing. Because data is always logged, there is no export tool in the Trace Viewer.

The Trace Viewer application should not be confused with the Trace VTScada Actions Application, which enables you to select different VTScada services (such as the RPC Manager and Modem Manager), and actions (the Navigator or SQL calls), and monitor the selected items by saving pertinent data about them (such as the date and time they executed) to disk.

There are three components involved in tracing:

  • The communications to be traced.
  • Each message source has its own format and therefore is stored in its own database.
  • The module that collects and writes the data to the database.
    This is DBTrace, a system-level module that maintains live communications with the Trace Viewer.
  • The viewer.
    This is the Trace Viewer application, where you can select, filter and display the communications data.

(Service names that contain a child-tag delimiter will be shown with a forward-slash, rather than the more usual back-slash.)

Trace files are regular Microsoft Access .MDB files, stored in the TraceFiles folder within the VTScada installation directory.

These files are deleted as they age, with the default set to 30 days. If you wish to modify this setting, you may do so using the DbTraceDaysToPreserve variable in Setup.ini. You may also control the size using DbTraceFileSize.This task is performed by the Trace Viewer, not the VTScada engine, and therefore older files are note deleted unless the Trace Viewer is running.

 

The Trace Viewer can collect the following information:

Driver Messages for running applications (always available while an application is running)

See: Driver Tracing

  • Timestamp, accurate to the nearest thousandth of a second
  • Direction (Sent or Received from the driver)
  • Service name
  • Driver name as entered in the tag
  • Driver area as entered in the tag
  • Driver description as entered in the tag
  • Port name that the driver is attached to
  • Data included in the communication to/from the driver (a string of hexadecimal values)

Historian Diagnostics (always available)

See: Historian Diagnostics

  • Error messages only. One or more Historians must be selected for tracing. Information collected includes:
  • Timestamp, accurate to the nearest thousandth of a second
  • Historian name
  • Trace type
  • Tag name - the source of the data that did not write.
  • Error code - a numeric code identifying the error.
  • Error text.
  • Message

RPC Diagnostics (always available)

See: Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Tracing

  • Timestamp, accurate to the nearest thousandth of a second
  • Identification of internal events
  • The message’s routing flag
  • Sequence number of the message
  • Direction (To or From the server identified by the IP address)
  • IP address of the message source or destination
  • Name of the application sending or receiving the message
  • Name of the service or machine
  • Data and parameters of the message

SOAP Messages (available only if you have a license for Remote Data Access)

See: Features for SOAP Message Tracing

  • Timestamp, accurate to the nearest thousandth of a second
  • Message number (large messages might be split across more than one line)
  • Message status (an HTML error code indicating success or failure)
  • Source IP address and Port number
  • Destination IP address and Port number
  • Indication of whether the message is incoming or outgoing.
  • The SOAP action (the function call being made)
  • Message size measured in bytes.
  • The SOAP-encoded XML message

OPC Server Trace Messages (available only if you have a license for the VTScada OPC Server and a running application is using that server)

Information collected includes:

  • Timestamp, accurate to the nearest thousandth of a second
  • Event description
  • Textual OPC item ID being read from or written to. (Often includes the tag name.)
  • Numeric ID of the OPC property
  • Write Value - the value being written to the tag
  • Result - depending on the nature of the read or write operation, may be one or more of the following:
  • the value being read or written,
  • the quality of the data transfer
  • the number of child nodes
  • the name of the tag
  • access rights
  • type
  • timestamp
  • Items such as quality, access rights, type, etc are numeric codes. See: Properties of Tag OPC Items.