Data Replay Accelerator for Spotfire®

Introduction

The Data Replay Accelerator for Spotfire® is used to capture and replay in real-time data from historian systems like OSI PI, OPC UA, or other repository. When an anomaly or trigger condition is detected, it retrieves a configurable amount of data before and after the anomaly, and gives operators the capability to replay this data for observation in a Spotfire dashboard. Operators can control the replay speed, as well as pause and resume. The goal is to assist with troubleshooting complex instrumented systems.

And here's a video showing how the Accelerator works:

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The Data Replay Accelerator for Spotfire® can be downloaded from the Exchange.

Business Scenario

Most modern systems are instrumented with a variety sensors, from cars to electronics, to lightbulbs. These sensors produce telemetry streams containing a variety of insights into the operations of equipment. Gathering all the data and making sense of it is a key problem in modern technical systems. But just detecting anomalies is only the first step in troubleshooting incidents. Engineers and technicians must then analyze the available data and identify what went wrong, and why. Traditionally this has been done using large, static datasets, and various analytic techniques. But by applying appropriate streaming technology, the ability to replay events in sequence can provide valuable information in troubleshooting.

Benefits and Business Value

The key benefit is to give operations support the opportunity to view the conditions that lead to a triggering condition. It gives the ability to go back in time around the trigger, capture the data, and then replay in a simulation so that conditions can be observed. The goal is to assist with troublshooting issues and applying fixes.

Technical Scenario

The Data Replay Accelerator for Spotfire® consists of an Event Manager for detecting anomalies and executing simulations. Spotfire® is used as a dashboard to display the list of triggers, and provide controls to start, pause, stop, and scale simulations. The replayed data is then displayed using a variety of standard visualizations. 

Sensor data streams are captured and analyzed in real-time. In the Accelerator this is done through a feed simulation, but in an actual implementation this would be integred with a historian system like an OSI PI event frame or polled snapshot, OPC UA node subscriber, or a live stream on a messaging middleware such as Kafka. 

Each data point is analyzed in real-time by applying user-defined rules to identify anomalies. This is done through the use of a decision table. When the anomaly condition is satisfied, the data point then becomes a Trigger and is recorded as such. The user defines a window with upper and lower bounds for the Trigger where related data of interest could be found. For example, the data of interest would be from 20 minutes before an Trigger to 5 minutes after, creating a total window of 25 minutes. The user also defines a list of related data points of interest, identified by tag name. 

Once the upper bound of the time window has elapsed, the Accelerator then retrieves all the related data points from a historical data repository, using the window bounds. In the Accelerator this is done using a placeholder CSV file and query table, but in a actual implementation this would be integrated with a historian system like an OSI PI snapshot, OPC HDA query, or database query. With all the related data gathered, the Trigger is then made available to the user for replay in simulation.

In the Spotfire® dashboard, the user is presented with a list of available Triggers and their current state. Once a Trigger is marked as Ready it may be replayed using simulation. Controls are provided to start, pause, scale, and stop simulations through user interaction. When the simulation runs it replays the Trigger data and all related tag data over the specified time window. Using the scale controls the user can view the data in true real time, or apply compression to view data at an accelerated rate. All data can be visualized in any standard Spotfire® visualization, or through custom visualizations implemented as Spotfire® Mods.

Components

Related Accelerators

This Accelerator is one of several used for industrial telemetry monitoring. These other Accelerators may also be of interest:

• Data Historian Accelerator
• Intelligent Equipment Accelerator
• IoT Completions Accelerator
• IoT Drilling Accelerator