The Industrial SNMP Suite provides valuable insight into the performance of a variety of industrial control system networks. The controllers, software, and underlying control network make up a modern control system. The entire system can become unreliable without stable performance from all three components. With SNMP Suite you can monitor and analyze your plant Ethernet-based network from within your existing HMI package and never have to rely on blind faith that the network is performing to specifications.
Plug-in Driver Features: The new SNMP driver also provides convenient "Specialty tags" to help users know more than the current value of a single polled OID. The tags include: History tags, Events tags, Table Offsets, and ScanFloor tags.
Auto Discovery - Save time by using the Auto-Discovery tool to search your Ethernet network for managed network devices
MIB Import - Import MIB files from manageable devices and easily map network device MIB addresses to SNMP tag names
Network Analyst - Network Analyst gathers raw SNMP data from network devices and continually performs calculations to generate data that can be used, such as bandwidth utilization and network error rate statistics
SNMP Traps Support - Many SNMP-manageable devices can be configured to send unsolicited data to network management software systems such as our SNMP driver. By configuring an SNMP device to send data without being "polled" such as when a critical system tag goes into an unfavorable state, you can reduce the need for "polling" the network device. SNMP driver supports receiving SNMP Trap data via Events tags as well as through defined Trap OIDs.
Historical Data Attributes - Previous Value, Delta Time, Moving Average
Historical values are generated by the SNMP driver (not the remote Agent/device) when an OID has valid historical modifiers appended to it.
Events Tags - Events_001, Events_001_001, Events_001_FieldCnt, Events_Count
A FIFO-based queue to receive Traps / Notifications from previously configured Agents.
Table Offsets - OID[1] Table access is accomplished by enumerating columns of a table. The SNMP Device driver uses an array-like notation for Table access.
ScanFloor property - _ScanRateFloor, _ScanRateFloorLock
SNMP devices are typically scanned at much slower rates than other controls equipment. Scanning an SNMP device too quickly may result in degraded device performance. The Scan Rate Floor has been added to prevent users from inadvertently overloading Agent/devices with read requests in the order of milliseconds.
The Scan Rate Floor is the minimum rate to scan SNMP devices. The default is 1000 milliseconds. When set (to a non-zero value) the SNMP driver will never scan the remote device more often than the specified scan rate. Note that an OPC client can still poll the server and obtain the last read value at a much faster OPC Group Update Rate. Finally, the 'Lock' option will lock the Scan Rate for this device to the given value. When Locked, the driver will always poll at the Scan Rate setting regardless of OPC client update rates that are below or above this rate.
Unmanaged Device Monitoring Not all Ethernet network devices are SNMP managed. To help monitor any system from within your HMI, the new SNMP suite contains a Ping driver which automatically generates OPC tags for each Unmanaged device defined. These "heartbeat" and "response time" tags provide a standardized and reliable way to monitor all devices in the Ethernet network.
Runtime Management of Device Polling The SNMP suite supports Device Auto-Demotion for Managed or Unmanaged devices. Users can adjust Auto-Demotion parameters to allow drivers to temporarily place a device off-scan in the event that it is not responding. This allows the driver to continue to optimize its communications with other available devices on the same channel as well as notify the client application of the event. A new ScanFloor device property provides robust polling control when the control application can not tolerate a one size fits all approach to network device polls. An additional benefit of the ScanFloor setting is its ability to handle devices independently especially when Agent loading is a concern. _System tags expose Auto-Demotion and ScanFloor tags to any HMI or control application of your choosing.
Supported Devices SNMP Managed Devices. The driver works with a broad range of SNMP Managed devices such as: