Single-mastering devices

When using single-mastering with Power Operation:

  1. Power Operation acquires historical (trend) data from all devices.
  2. The Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) tool transfers historical data from Power Operation to Power Monitoring Expert for use in Power Monitoring Expert reports and dashboards.

NOTE: ETL is licensed as part of Advanced Reporting Module

Single-mastering is the preferred device communication architecture for the following reasons: 

  • Improved performance – Power Operation trend acquisition can be assigned a lower priority than real-time and alarm data thereby reducing CPU and RAM loads
  • Increased functionality – Allows PME reporting to be run on devices with protocols not intrinsically supported by PME (for example: IEC-61850, DNP3, SNMP, BACnet, etc.)
  • Simplified deployments and maintenance – Devices are set up and maintained in Power Operation only. There is no risk that device names between Power Operation and PME are inconsistent.
  • Recovery from failure scenarios – If the Power Monitoring Expert Server or Power Operation Primary Server become unavailable, the ETL can still transfer the data.

    In test scenarios where PME communication was unavailable for 1.5 days and then became available again, the ETL when triggered manually took the following times to catch up and re-establish steady state for the following system sizes:

    • 35,000 tags logged every 15 minutes: On average, the system took 30 minutes to recover the lost 1.5 days' worth of data
    • 105,000 tags logged every 15 minutes: On average, the system took 95 minutes to recover the lost 1.5 days' worth of data

NOTE: When using single mastering, it is recommended that you increase the RAM beyond the minimal RAM requirements for the system size.

There are exceptions where single-mastering cannot be used. See Multi-mastering devices for details.