Aurora Classic Release Notes v5.12

Aurora On-prem Release Notes v5.12

Aurora On-prem

Supported Web Browser Notification

Upon accessing the Aurora Platform the application will check the internet browser being used and will display a warning message if the browser used is unsupported.  The official supported web browser for the Aurora Platform is Internet Explorer 10 and newer.



Comm Status View

The Comm Status View has been updated so that the User is able to see the device, entity and tag associations.

How to view device and entity comm statuses:

  1. Already logged in at the Site level, click on the Operations menu option.
  2. Select Comm status and the application will display the Comm Status screen with the device comms by Name, Type, IP Address, Comm Status, and Data Quality.  
  3. To view the Entity Comms by device, click on the View Entities button on the same row as the device.  The application displays the entity comms for the device by Name, Location, Comm Status, and Data Quality.  
  4. To view the Entity Details, click on the Entity Details button on the same row as the equipment and the application displays the Entity Details screen.  
  5. To view the Entity tags, click on the Grid icon in the upper right-hand corner and the application displays the entity's tag names and values.  

Admin

Site Config

In the Site Config, an expand and collapse feature was added to the Site List for ease of navigation.




Entity Config

Added the Gateway Read Formula field so that the Admin User can edit an entity/tag instance read formula in Aurora Admin vs running scripts to update the formulas.

How to edit a microserver device tag read formula:

  1. Logon to Aurora Admin
  2. Select the Admin tab
  3. Select the Server Config tab
  4. Select an Entity
  5. Select a tag and the application displays the tag configuration with a read formula field
  6. Edit the read formula and the application validates that a read formula exists and updates the formula

Data Persistence Options

The Data Persistence Options configurations will require a minimum of 24 hours of data kept for the minute data interval and a minimum of 48 hours data kept for the quarter hours data interval.

In the screenshot below the User attempted to enter a 0 in the Minute Persistence (in hours) field but after clicking the Save button the application displays an error message and replaces the 0 with the minimum 24.



To improve the performance of trending, reporting and other views the Seconds Persistence can be changed to 0.  This will remove the need to store and process any unnecessary data.  This will be set to 0 by default and can be changed by customer request.  This does not impact event (testing and emergency) data that is stored for compliance and reporting.

Alarms

To help out with troubleshooting offline devices we have added the device's location to the alarm notifications.  When the device is associated with entities in a singular location then the application will provide a location by Site, Building, Floor and/or Room.  If the device is associated with entities in multiple locations then the application will display Serving Multiple.  When an offline device serves one entity then the application will display the entity as a hyperlink that will take you to the entity details.

The device offline alarm shown below includes multiple entities in the same building, floor, and room.



The device offline alarm shown below includes multiple entities in the same building and floor but in different rooms.



The device offline alarm shown below includes multiple entities in a different building, floor, and room.



Bad Quality Data

To help with troubleshooting we have replaced 0.00 data readings in the live views with ??? to indicate when there is a bad data reading.  Bad data reading could be any of the following. 

Kepware data quality = bad

  • the device is offline, then all tags receive bad quality data
  • a tag with a formula field and the formula syntax is bad
  • a tag with a formula that is referencing a tag that has bad quality data
  • invalid i/o address at the tag level 

Gateway data quality = bad

  • the device is offline, then all tags receive bad quality data
  • a tag with a formula field and the formula syntax is bad
  • for an entity with multiple gims and 1 gim goes offline then bad quality just for that gim 
  • invalid


Note:  To retrieve the last known good value the End User will need to preform trending.

Live View

A scroll bar was added to the Live View menu list to accommodate a long list of Live Views.


In design mode, the tags listed in the Inputs and Values tabs are now listed in alpha order.





Improvements have been made to Trending so that the data results render faster, it provides more ways to receive the data and it provides only the trending options appropriate for the time duration and tags selected.

All of the trending selection criteria are now visible on the trending screen.  Prior to this release, you had to click on the cogwheel icon to see the chart type, data interval, and roll-up options.

The Data interval options are dynamically available based on the server's data persistence configuration and the trending duration entered. When the trending duration is entered then the application looks up the server persistence configuration and determines what data intervals can be displayed. When the user attempts to trend on data that is outside of the data persistence window then a warning message is displayed "WARNING - the data retention policy does not have data available for the time frame and interval selected."

Tag selections are now viewable by location (site, building, floor, room) prior to this release the tags were shown by the system.  Not all tags are associated with a system so it caused a little bit of confusion.

When 10 or fewer tags are selected there are four chart types available:

  • Line Chart - displays the data in a line chart
  • Data Grid - displays the data in a grid format
  • Download - downloads the data results to a csv file with the option to open or save to location.
  • Export To Email - creates a csv file and emails the file to the requested recipients
  • Export To File - saves a csv file to a file location on the Blue Pillar server


When there are 11 or more tags selected there are two output types available:

  • Export to Email - emails a csv file to the recipient of your choice 
  • Export to File - saves a csv file to a file location on the Blue Pillar server

IMPORTANT:  the export to file is mapped to the Blue Pillar Server.  Access to the Blue Pillar server files may only be available through your IT Department.  


Aurora Server Maintenance Service

This service is a background service for Aurora Platform servers.  The  following tasks were added or modified in the service:

  • DiagnosticsRetrieverTask (modified)
  • ExpiringCertificateNotificationTask
  • DiagnosticsNotificationTask
  • TelemetryDataCleanupNotificationTask
  • CleanUpLogsTask
  • ProcessAnalyticsDataTask 

Defect Fixes

Functional Area

Description of Defect

Event Details

When an event name was renamed the event/email reports button did not appear to generate new reports.

Entity Details

For long entity names, the name was getting cut off in the header drop-down field.

Entity Details Grid View

The # of columns field label was hidden.

Reports

The report list of values background and font color hid the field name.

OPC UA

OPCUA sessions were ending and sometimes would restart a new session before the old one ended.  

Server Config

Manually creating tags was missing the LegacySiteName and LegacySystemName which rendered the tags useless from an entity status perspective.

Server Config

When a device is renamed the rename did not filter down to the LegacyDevice and LegacyOpcItemName.

Tag Config

When a Tag was renamed in the DevOps Tool the new name did not appear in the Aurora Admin.

DevOps Tool

When renaming a tag the tool was not updating the Tag.LegacyVariableName and Tag.LegacyOpcItemName.  With this fix, we included displaying a warning message if the tag is included in a formula to give the admin user the opportunity to fix the formulas.

Equipment Template

When creating or editing equipment items from the equipment template page the adds/edits were not persisting correctly.

Accumulator Tags

Accumulator tags sample size was set to 0 in the rollup process that caused it to be divided by 0.  Adjusted the data rollup process to check for 0 or null and set to 1.

A change in a previous version caused the accumulator tags to stop persisting correctly.  Only one customer has accumulator tags and fortunately, they are on a prior version that did not impact them.

Hot Fixes

Functional Area

Description of Defect

Frog Integration

The frog integration was stopping after one day due to a configuration issue.  Updated the integration to use UTC instead of the config end date.

Diagnostic Retriever 

The diagnostic retriever task was failing because a table was exceeding the size of the INT.  

API History Route Errors

The API history route errors when duplicate timestamps are passed in.  

Test Manager

Load Shed Event without an ATS was always aborting.  Updated Load Shed Events to allow switchgear to participate without ATSs.

Trending Export

The trending export was not able to export discrete data (seconds interval).

Missing API Data for SolarEdge

The SolarEdge API data was missing kWh.

Kepware Connection Goes Stale in OPCUA Service

 

  • In a mixed Kepware and Gateway environment, the OPCUA service has been modified to monitor the Kepware connection and restart if necessary.  This was previously handled by Control Manager in a Kepware-only environment, but it was not capable of handling a mixed environment.

 

  • The OPCUA service will monitor the Kepware connection at 5-minute (configurable) intervals.

 

  • If the Kepware connection goes stale, the OPCUA service will attempt to reconnect three times.

 

  • If the Kepware reconnection is not successful, a warning email is sent to the user, and the OPCUA service will force a Kepware disconnect/reconnect.

 

  • If the Kepware disconnect is not successful, the User will receive a warning email with instructions to manually intervene.

 

  • The OPCUA monitoring rate is configurable in the BluePillarConfiguration DB, BPServerAttribute table.

Telnet Connect Errors

We were receiving alot of Telnet Connect Errors and discovered that we were trying to secure non-sixnet devices when we shouldn't be.  We corrected this by blacklisting the IP Address of the non-sixnet devices so we don't attempt to secure them.

Alarm Processor

The alarm processor was not honoring the alarm time delay for gatekeeping tags.  This has been corrected so that the alarm method checks for a time delay before it attempts to activate.

Alarm will not clear

An active alarm appeared in the alarm view but all entities/devices associated with the alarm were no longer in the condition to be active.  The only way to remove the alarms was to restarted BP services.  

Aurora Server Maintenance

The diagnostic file was hanging so we made the HttpClient timeout to be configurable because the 100 seconds was too short for the servers to complete the tasks. The job was also updated to be asynchronous to avoid blocking the thread with .Result. 

Kepware Config 

The Kepware configuration was being generated twice when services were restarted for customers that had consolidated kepware channels.

30% Load Compliance Criteria
The 30% Load Compliance Criteria was not working with a multiple generator system.  The event calendar was showing an event was not meeting the 30% load compliance criteria when it did meet the requirement.
Control Manager not updating Kewpare Config
When the kepware configuration was out of sync with the control manager.  As a result, alarms were not being triggered, data was not being inserted in the database and data was not coming in and test signals were not occurring.
Missing Engine Running Emails
When a server name is substituted for an Entity Name and an alarm is triggered the alarm is not sent to the end-users.  To remediate this issue Blue Pillar needs to enforce that all entities need to be configured in a system and we removed all Server and Site Level Alarms.  
EPMS Alarms Indicator
The alarm indicator on the EPMS screen was including alarms for entity types that are not included on that screen.  The alarm count should only include producers and transfer switch entity types.
TestManager SQL Timeout
Updated the TestManager SQL Timeout from 15 seconds to 30 seconds to avoid and error we receive with remote databases.  The SQL Timeout is configurable if it needs to be extended longer then 30 seconds.
Offline Alarms
The entity status alarm was disabled in the previous 5.12 build and has been rectified to be enabled by default.


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