aep regional seminar presentation

7/30/2019 AEP Regional Seminar Presentation

1/22

2008 OSIsoft, Inc. | Company Confidential

IT Application Monitoring

Using PI AF and Notifications

Josiah Thoen - AEP


2/22

2 2008 OSIsoft, Inc. | Company Confidential

AEP Who We Are By Assets

One of the largest U.S. electricity generators ( ~38,000 MWs) with a significant cost advantage in

many of our market areas

Largest consumer of coal in the Western

Hemisphere

Operations within four RTOs

PJM

SPP

ERCOT

MISO

A leading consumer of natural gas

Major wind power developer

(#3 in U.S. in 2005)

39,000 miles of transmission

186,000 miles of distribution

Coal transportation

7,000 railcars

2,230 barges and 53 towboats

5 million customers


3/22


AEP IT - Service Performance

Monitoring AEP IT Assets for over 7 years

Servers

Hardware, Operating Systems (Windows and Unix)

Middleware Platforms

IIS, BEA WebLogic, etc.

Applications

In house custom applications

Vendor Applications BlackBerry Server, Lotus Notes, etc.


4/22


AEP IT - PI Infrastructure

PI Server Collective

2 Servers 8 CPU, 8gb RAM, 85gb

SAN Drive Space

Software:

PI Server

AF & Notification

MS SQL Express

ACE (Backup)

Data Acquisition Node

2 CPU, 2gb RAM, 30gb Local

Drive Space Software:

IT Monitor Interfaces

Custom PISDK monitoringservices

Analytics Server

2 CPU, 2gb RAM, 30gb LocalDrive Space

Software:

ACE (Primary)

Stats:

Tags: 94,049

Modules: 54,076

AF Elements: ~10,000

AF Element Templates: ~25

Notifications: 331

Data Storage:

1gb every 23days


5/22


AEP IT and PI the beginning

PI IT Monitor Pilot

Customer

IT Application Support Teams Primary

IT Operations Secondary

Business Units - Secondary

Purpose

Production Server and Application visibility

Result

Infrastructure monitoring approach

Application Monitoring


6/22


AEP IT and PI - Problems

Time Series data is not relational Convoluted naming conventions and overloaded tag

attributes

Network > Datacenter > Server > Components >Application > Middleware > Database > and back

Maintenance nightmare Everything is manual

Numerous duplicate displays

No Event Management All this data but no way to knowing when something is

broken.


7/227 2008 OSIsoft, Inc. | Company Confidential

AEP IT and PI - Solutions

Problem: Time Series data is not relational Solution: AF Relational Meta Data on top of Time

Series data.

Problem: Maintenance nightmare Solution: AF Template based management of

elements and their attributes

Problem: No Event Management Solution: PI Notifications Template based triggered

event delivery



AF Implementation

WebMethods BrokerClient QueueLength

monitoring SoftwareAG WebMethods

SOA, B2B messaging platform

Pub-Sub Message Brokering Publisher sends a message to a Broker.

Broker delivers the message to one or more Subscribers ofthat message.

Used in many Tier 1 and 2 application services and

business processes Facilitates communication with external counter parties

Used Internally to send data between applications.



Business Need

Monitor the Broker to make sure that client queues

are not getting full. Publishing clients send messages to the Broker

Broker delivers the message to subscribing clientsqueue.

Subscribing clients retrieve messages from their queue.

Implications of failure:

Client may be unavailable.

Broker may be having problems.



Functional Requirements

Store the Broker Client Info data.

Alerting:

Warn when queue contains 25+ messages.

Alarm when queue contains 75+ messages.

Alerts must send a Clear message when the alertingcondition is gone.

Alerting Recipient:

Email notification to those interested.

AEP IT Command Center:

24x7 Support Center.

All Events go to Central Event Management System.



Monitoring Process

Data Acquisition PISDK Custom Monitor

Invoke a service within the WebMethods environmentevery 60 seconds.

Parse data.

Do exception testing

Send data to PI. Automatically Add new Broker Clients to AF as they are

discovered.

Automatically create tags for Broker Clients if they do

not exist.



AF Element Templates

BrokerClientInfo:

Defines the attributes of a BrokerClient as it exists inWebMethods.

Each Attribute references a PI Point.

Appname =

\\%Server%\BrokerClientInfo_%..\..\Element%_%..\Element%_%Element%_%Attribute%_Info

QueueLength =

\\%Server%\BrokerClientInfo_%..\..\Element%_%..\Element%_%Element%_%Attribute%_Count



BrokerClientInfo Template


14/22



AF Element Structure

WebMethods Brokers



AF Element Structure



Notification Process - Requirements

Notification is based on the QueueLength attribute

of a BrokerClientInfo.

Needs to be customizable for each client.

Needs to be disabled for certain clients.

Default Warning = 25.

Default Alarm = 75.



Notification Process - Template

Attribute Template:



Notification Process Warn Trigger

IF Notification enabled

And

Warn enabled

AndQueueLength >= Warn value

And

QueueLength < Alarm value



Notification Process Alarm Trigger

IF Notification enabled

And

Alarm enabledAnd

QueueLength >= Alarm value



Delivery Channel

WebService

Sends Target and Trigger value to ourEventManagement Web Service.

Target = AFElement Path

Value = CRITICAL, WARN, OK

Event Management Web Service Gets additional details from AF using the Target.

Creates an Event Management message and sends it to ourEvent Management server.

Closes the previous event using the EventId attribute fromthe AF element.

Sends new EventId back to AF Targets EventId attribute.


22/2222

Event Management View

BMC Impact Explorer

Transpara

aep regional seminar presentation

Documents