Though you may have never needed to contact Software Toolbox for support, it’s always smart to be ready for any challenges that might arise. That’s why it’s helpful to know the resources you have at your disposal, should you ever need to connect with our experienced support team to overcome any challenges when using our solutions.
At Software Toolbox, we are committed to providing our users with timely and high-quality responses to their support incidents. While your question or issue might not always be completely resolved after the first response, you can expect to receive our initial response within 2 regular business hours after submitting a question, although it often happens much sooner! We even have some tools that can help speed up this process.
As a part of our Tech Support Corner blog post series, this blog post covers how the OPC Router’s Application Report helps us help you by allowing you to provide much of the information that we need to troubleshoot issues when you initially contact us.
What is OPC Router?
If you aren’t familiar with OPC Router, it is a software solution for integrating a variety of industrial, business, and IoT data sources. With drag-and-drop visual workflows, templates for configuration scalability, and a platform-independent browser-based configuration, OPC Router enables you to bring your systems together quickly and at scale. We have a large portfolio of OPC Router video training resources that cover everything from basic training of the product to complex scenarios. You can also find multiple OPC Router-specific blogs that our team curated. Feel free to subscribe to our blogs to receive weekly updates!
What is an Application Report?
Answers to OPC Router questions and issues can often be expedited when all the necessary information to determine the problem has been provided upfront. OPC Router allows you to quickly and easily gather and archive important troubleshooting data. When combined with a detailed description of the behavior you are seeing, an Application Report helps us help you as quickly as possible!
By default, the OPC Router Application Report includes the following:
- Project file (including all plug-ins, connections, and templates)
- Backups of the entire configuration database, runtime database, and state database
- The Windows event log
- The OPC Router log files for the last 3 days
You can optionally include authentication data, though we only suggest doing so if it is requested. When requested, this authentication data is used to help us troubleshoot any authentication issues with Plug-Ins and includes data such as usernames, obfuscated passwords, and certificates. While we typically do not request these items, if you have any questions on how we use this data, please ask!
How do I capture an Application Report?
An OPC Router Application Report can be captured and provided to our team in 8 easy steps:
- From the web management console, which is included in all v5 releases of OPC Router, you will first need to select the Menu “hamburger” button on the left-hand side of the window:
- Hover over Diagnosis, then select Application Report in the menu that appears.
- Now, select the items to include in the application report. Unless our support team directs you otherwise, we suggest that you use the default settings.
- Select the Create button:
- Select OK:
- Select the Download button:
This will download a “.applicationReport” file to wherever your browser defaults.
- Once collected, we request that you upload the file to our ShareFile system, as Application Reports can get large enough that sending them through email is not ideal. Also, when opening a support ticket in the next step, a link to our ShareFile upload portal is provided. All file transfers completed within this system are secured by encrypted upload and are only accessible to the Software Toolbox Support Team.
- Open a support ticket letting us know that the Application Report has been uploaded. Make sure you include the following:
- A brief description of the architecture in place
- A clear description of the issue (Expected vs seen behavior)
- When the issue began
- The OPC Router ID, which is used to link your license and machine. This can be found in the Menu under the About tab in the management console.
- If the issue involves other systems, such as data not reaching its end destination, include screenshots if possible.
While an Application Report may not always be the only tool our support engineers will ask you to use to gather information, it is one of the easiest ways to provide as much information as possible when first contacting us. This is especially useful when in different time zones, to ensure our team can assist you as quickly as possible.
Our team may also request that you provide the Runtime and Management logs, which would also need to be uploaded to our ShareFile system. These can also be found under “Diagnosis”:
The Runtime logs include information about the OPC Router Runtime Service, inray.OPCRouter.Service.exe, including the version in use, when the service was last started, how long it has been running, information about the computer it is running on (such as OS, time zone, and processor), and any errors that the OPC Router runtime is reporting along with the relevant stack traces.
And for those who are also using TOP Server, check out our blog on capturing TOP Server Application Reports.
Remember to subscribe to our technical blog to not only be notified of future posts on OPC Router and other software applications from Software Toolbox, but also to learn about relevant technical topics related to industrial process automation and solving related challenges..
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