Remote Diagnostics Monitoring logical for Preemptive support, and Higher Availability.

I talked about last week the influence of IT on the strategies for System Administration/ Diagnostics with respect to drive towards using off the shelf IT tools for System Admin such as Microsoft’s System Center.  But there is another trait form It coming into software and that is the desire for pro-active monitoring of the software systems, vs the traditional just logging of systems.

I was in an executive meeting a couple of years ago in Southern Africa, where we had a number of the CIOs from some of the world leading companies and we discussed the shortage of expertise, the outsourcing of IT and engineering, and the increasing complexity of solutions, and most of all the ever changing evolution of modern software components of a solution. These brainstorming discussions around one table with a set of leading thought leaders , brought up challenges and opportunities.

One of the key challengers was having expertise on internal teams that understood the error measures , best practices and can stay up to date, as it is hard to (impossible to have dedicated people) to one system or product. Now this has been solved by traditional database companies, and systems, by these companies providing a diagnostics / monitoring service that pro-actively   the site systems, with a dedicated team of product experts, who are up date and can dedicate 100% of their time to staying up to date. In the "Business Applications Software" segement and in DCS hardware, and High availability hardware companies this has existed for a long time, but  not in the traditional automation software sector. But again in the last 2 years we have seen this practice, or service come being offered.   

Already Invensys Southern Africa  has set up and is offering this service as an Invensys Sentinel service:

“As skills scarcity increases, most production technicians are stretched to the limit with their Daily tasks. Little time is left to maintain the running software systems and very few can find the time to develop and maintain specialist knowledge to diagnose faults on these systems.

As a result of this change in market conditions, Invensys offers Sentinel Services (ISS) technology that monitors the performance of your Wonderware system — continuously.

Invensys delivers the following Sentinel Services capabilities:

·          Continuous proactive monitoring

·          Remedial remote diagnosis support

·          Wonderware system health review

Command Center in South Africa

We achieve this by installing special “agent software” on each Wonderware server located at customer sites. These agents monitor the system on a 24x7 basis to ensure that critical resources are performing within best practice norms.

If an unacceptable threshold is reached, an alarm is raised and Invensys engineers are alerted before an issue develops. Remote connectivity is also designed to ensure that, if there is a problem, Invensys experts can work with you to make appropriate adjustments to correct the issue and return your system to normal operation quickly and easily.

It is typical of the innovation of the Southern African team, and you can expect to see this evolve into a main stream offering over the next 12 months.

Again these CIOs (eg IT) had an expectation of the fact they can monitor their business datbases and applications and systems by external services with with the expertise WHY NOT in the automation/ operations software. Another example of impact of existing IT practices and it been adopted as an acceptable practice in this automation sector.

But I would question the need for just monitoring we want to go to exception based awareness of the software systems, and treat these as assets in your production system just like the your large capex assets such as furnaces, bottling lines, pump stations, WHY NOT? I would like to start down this topic this week and expand to making Software apart of Asset Maintenance strategies.

What is the influence of IT on System Administration/ Diagnostics Approaches in Automation/ Operations  Systems?

The continued transformation of the automation/ operation systems under the significant influence of IT continues 14 to 15 years after the influence started to be felt during the “year 2000” panic and awareness. To me the most significant impact of this period was that corporate IT become aware during the software audits of the amount of desktop/ and servers running on the plants. From this time I have sat in many meeting where leading company IT engineers have discussed how they can bring more management and therefore sustainability to these systems.

The pressures on these trends / discussion continue and for good reason:

·         Security and threat of cyber security attacks down in plants is now not a dream but a reality

·         The continue stream line of IT and driving the IT cost down through outsourcing.

·         Also the never ending annual, and sub annual upgrading of OS especially now that most automation/operations systems run on Microsoft Operating systems, there is a treadmill of upgrades, due to security and technology evolution.

These are to name a few, and this is so different to 80s and 90s (when many of the current automation systems where originally developed), where the OS was isolated from these outside effects.

But the above pressures will not go away, no matter how much automation engineers “dig their heads in the sand”, because the reality of:

·         information distribution to a much bigger audience in the plants

·         alignment between operational and business

·         operational empowerment

·         driving of cost out of systems

·         increasing reliability

are only going to grow.

So in the last 12 months I have been increasingly asked and internally we evolving the System Administration/ Diagnostic functions to be not built by likes of the automation vendors like Invensys, but for our systems to plug into the System Administration tools already adopted by IT to manage their overall backoffice and server systems. To be honest this makes a lot of sense, as these tools Microsoft System Center, IBM Tivoli, etc, as they are rich in administration functions and are understood.

So now if we take or existing:

·         Licensing management

·         Patch and software version management

·         System Diagnostics

·         Security Management

Extending it with the virtual machine management, which is becoming a natural way for deployment in automation and operational systems, but with no overall co-ordination.

This all seems the natural evolution for the automation vendors including DCS/ PLC control system administration to be developed into services that naturally run in these powerful IT System Administration tools, extending them with the industrial domain.

Another aspect we seeing is the remote diagnostics outsourcing of automation/ systems to a remote expert systems that pro-actively monitor the systems and engage the plants in a pro-active way. This I will walk through next week, but again it is a natural concept that has come from IT.