Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"Ernest L. Williams Jr." <[email protected]> · Fri, 24 Mar 2006 03:08:43 -0500

On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 23:18 -0600, Michael Borland wrote:
> Ernest,
> 
> At APS we use alh for alarm handling (to alert operators to alarms and 
> help them investigate alarms) and sddsalarmlog for alarm logging (for 
> archival purposes and analysis).  The text log files from alh are not that 
> convenient for postprocessing and can get rather large (though this is not 
> a big problem now as it was during commissioning). 
> sddsalarmlog also 
> optionally grabs the value of a related PV when the alarm goes off, which 
> makes it easier to figure out what happened.  Since the input files to 
> sddsalarmlog are SDDS files, much of the maintenance is automated (e.g., 
> when PV names change or PVs are deleted).  Since sddsalarmlog is not 
> dependent on a GUI, we start/restart it with a cron job so it is 
> "guaranteed" to always be running.
This is the behavior we need with respect to alarm logging.

> 
> We have a Tcl/Tk application that allows analysis of sddsalarmlog output, 
> giving time histograms, alarm history, alarm counts per PV, alarm overlap 
> analysis, status word decoding, etc.
That is very useful. We will need the same here.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

Ernest

> 
> --Michael
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> |       Michael Borland, Ph. D.     |   Bldg 401/B2201              |
> |          Senior Scientist         |   9700 S. Cass Avenue         |
> |      APS Operations Division      |   Argonne, IL    60439        | 
> |    Argonne National Laboratory    |                               |
> |         [email protected]       |   (630) 252-4205  office      |
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> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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> 
> On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Ernest L. Williams Jr. wrote:
> 
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > Two questions:
> >
> > (1) How many sites used the EPICS AlarmHandler.
> >
> > (2) Has anyone changed the EPICS AlarmHandler to run in daemon mode or
> > as a service?
> >
> > This would be a useful mode when the logging option is used.
> >
> > So, basically we would need a commandline option to enable this and give
> > us an alhLogger, ah?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Ernest L. Williams Jr.
> > SNS Control Systems Group
> > ORNL
> >
> >

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System