General Information

Network Operational Performance Management is an important topic, as data communication bottlenecks have great impact on the bottom line and production servers. This software is a server for data acquisition which enables SNMP and Performance Monitor data to be available to any OPC-DA client, including data historian-based real-time performance management (RTPM) systems and OPC-DA compatible SCADA systems. It uses a fast and reliable data acquisition engine allowing massive real-time SNMP and WMI monitoring. Features include:

Scan of multiple devices;

Compatible with SNMP V1, V2C and V3 and WMI Devices;

Intelligent scan load control;

Statistical tags such as interface usage, error rates, broadcast and unicast rates;

Full support to Device Traps;

Data filtering (averaging);

Compliant with the OPC DA2 specification;

Historian Service;

System Requirements

This OPC server has the following minimal system requirements:

Microsoft Windows NT4/2000/XP;

Service Pack 5(NT4) / Service Pack 4(2000) / Service Pack 1(X);

Intel/AMD processor @ 600MHz;

128MB RAM;

50MB Hard drive space;

Network interface card (Ethernet).

Higher system hardware requirements may be necessary when scanning more than five thousand tags or when a large number of tags are scanned at a fast rate.

Server Overview

Both servers follows the requirements of the OPC specification to provide data access to an OPC client. They are compatible with OPC Data Access (DA) version 2.0 of the OPC interface and they can be used to monitor every reachable SNMP device that implements SNMP V1, V2C and V3 or every reachable computer running Windows with WMI enabled. Both servers' core are heavily optimized to achieve high performance by measuring response times of every device and balancing server load to maintain the specified refresh rate for all devices. It is possible to customize scan parameters from each device or computer, like the number of multiple variables that are read in the same SNMP request allowing you to build the most optimized configuration for your network environment.

Tools Overview

XRatel Performance Suite provides two tools to manage servers and data and two servers to manage data acquisition for each technology: SNMP and WMI. The other tools (Tag Explorer and Health Analyst) show all data collected. These tools are listed below:
 

XRatel Server - This is the software responsible for data acquisition and delivery. There are 2 different servers: SNMP and PerfMon.

XRatel Historian Service - This service is responsible to take all data captured in the Server and to store it for future view.

XRatel Server Configuration - This tool helps you to configure both OPC Server and Historian Service. It allows you to indicate witch devices and tag should be monitored and recorded.

XRatel Server Monitor - Allows you to manage both servers, simplifying server reboot, configuration reloading and displaying statistics about they.

XRatel Tag Explorer - This software can take all data stored by Historian Service, plotting charts and displaying values and alarms.

XRatel Health Analyst - This software can take some tags data and show four charts in the same window for the last 60 minutes, 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days.