Fleet PI System Monitoring for Power Generation 

Project Description

Casne Engineering collaborated with a leading energy and power generation company to develop a comprehensive monitoring solution for all PI servers at their numerous fossil generation sites and growing portfolio of renewable energy sites. Each site has 3 or more local servers that are a part of the PI system, which represented a struggle for the client’s PI support team to maintain since there was no centralized visibility into these critical assets. The team was in a constant reactive mode, since issues often occurred without warning, and the PI support team had to scramble to get the critical services back online for the plant to have use of their reporting tools. This project replaces the Network Operations Center (NOC) Service formerly offered by OSIsoft (now part of AVEVA).

The PI System Monitoring provides multiple layers of monitoring. First, monitoring is done on the local servers for items that may not be able to be monitored remotely, and notifications are sent from the local site to the PI support team. Second, monitoring is done on a centralized PI server for items that cannot be monitored locally, including the notification service not running on the local server or a network issue causing disconnection of the site from the wider corporate network. These multiple layers of monitoring provide redundancy against single-points-of-failure in the monitoring solution.

There are multi-layer centralized dashboards that allow the PI support team to easily see the health of all PI systems in the company. Each site has a drill-down display with more details including server and application monitoring of the Data Archive, AF, PI Vision, PI interfaces, and other critical PI infrastructure. When an event is detected, notifications are sent by email and text to essential stakeholders. Critical alerts are also sent to ServiceNow to automatically create a ticket for the team to track the issue's progress. 

In addition, Casne and the Client developed a PI Vision custom symbol to put sites, servers, or units into maintenance mode and prevent nuisance alarms during server maintenance activities, such as patching. When servers are not in maintenance, the monitoring enables the client's PI support team to quickly identify and respond to issues, sometimes even before the local stakeholders notice a problem.