We have an ADVANT 400 Series DCS and ADVACmmand UGI. There is a problem on alarm logging. All alarms are printed on dot matrix printer via operator station serial port and about 34 pages of alarms reside in RAM of station. If we receive a high level shutdown and UPS power lost (black start), all new alarms resident in memory will be lost, and we don't know what is resone of shutdown. The dot matrix printer does not print any alarm because of power lost. Can I save all alarm pages residing in memory to a notebook computer via com port at same time new alarm is generated? Is there any software to log alarms from com port? Thanks.

 

We use a product from Matrikon called ProcessGuard (now Alarm Manager). It allows you to capture alarms from a serial port, network port, or database and store them in a database. It has some analysis tools to help you process your alarms too.

 

Hi...
Were you able to address your lost alarms issue? How did you do it?

-Greg

 

Have a look at http://www.aggsoft.com/serial-data-logger.htm

It might be what you are looking for. It may run as a service and will make daily log files if you want. We used it for several months and it never failed. Many versions available, depends on options you need.