*** Recall of Citect SCADA 2018 / 2018 R2 Updates (July - October 2020)

Hi everyone, 

It's with regret that I share that we have identified a regression in recent Citect SCADA Monthly Updates that can affect the operational view of Alarm information including Alarm Summary, Alarm Counts, and other Alarm-related views, and it’s important that we notify our customers who could potentially be affected.

We have shared this message with potentially affected customers who have downloaded any of the following Monthly Updates;

  • Citect SCADA 2018 Update 22 (Jul 2020)
  • Citect SCADA 2018 Update 23 (Aug 2020)
  • Citect SCADA 2018 Update 24 (Sept 2020)
  • Citect SCADA 2018 Update 25 (Oct 2020)
  • Citect SCADA 2018 R2 Update 08 (Jul 2020)
  • Citect SCADA 2018 R2 Update 09 (Aug 2020)
  • Citect SCADA 2018 R2 Update 10 (Sept 2020)
  • Citect SCADA 2018 R2 Update 11 (Oct 2020)

 

The set of steps that produces this issue is complex, and involves systems including Alarm Redundancy, a large number of Clients, and events which are causing the Alarm Servers to switch roles and Display Clients to switch their connection. This can occur with cases of Domain Users and/or local Citect users. Most concerning, the occurrence of this can appear to be random, with the outcome being that the Alarm Counts, Alarm Summary and/or Alarm view components may fail silently. 

With our strongest recommendation we advise the following actions;

  1. If you haven’t yet implemented any of these Updates, postpone the installation.
  2. If you have implemented any of these Updates, uninstall these Updates and roll-back your implementation to the June 2020 Update, available from the AVEVA Knowledge & Support Center website at https://softwaresupport.aveva.com/. The Uninstallation process needs to be performed individually for each Update listed above.
  3. These Updates should be considered “recalled”; please delete any local copies so they’re not accidentally installed in future.
  4. If you have shared any of the above Updates with someone else, please also share this message with them.

 

For a Redundant configuration, our recommended order would be to first roll-back Primary Servers (across all Clusters, if required), followed by Clients, and finally any Standby Servers.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the roll-back procedure for your Citect SCADA system, please reach out to your local Distributor and/or AVEVA Support team for specific advice – they will be your best contact for any questions.

Our investigations into the root cause of this issue are ongoing, and we will be publishing a new Update to resolve this issue as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I’m not yet able to forecast when a new Update might be available.

We have also taken the decision to delay the release of the November Update for both Citect SCADA 2018 & 2018 R2 versions as we prioritise the investigation and resolution of this issue, which is our highest development priority. I’ll provide further updates when I have more news regarding this investigation and the availability of a new Update.

I sincerely apologise for the inconvenience.

Kind Regards,

Brad Shaw
Product Manager – SCADA/HMI

Parents
  • Hi everyone,

    Is anyone else experiencing problems with the alarms servers using the December 2020 update?
    Our system consists of 2 redundant I/O, alarm, trend, report servers & 2 display clients as terminal servers. 

    We had the update 23 (Aug 2020) installed in our servers when the recall was announced. The only issue we had noticed at that time was the alarm process not responding during the process restart, so we proceeded with the roll-back to the update June 2020 following the instructions of the recall.

    In January, we created 40 new users in the system due to a request from the operations team. Since then, we started to have "random" problems displaying the alarms. Basically, the alarm page stops being updated in the display using cicode functions AlarmDsp() and AlarmDspLast(). The alarm log device is working fine as well as playing a .wav file when an alarm is active.

    One of the attempts to solve the problem was the installation of the December 2020 update following the regular sequence: 1) primary server; 2) standby server and 3) display clients, but the issue persists.

    We noticed that when an issue occurs, it is possible to return to regular operation when one of the current users logs off. We also tested restarting the alarm process. Sometimes the restart of the process in the standby server is enough, but in other cases we need to restart just the primary. Currently, we are restarting the alarm process of the standby server every hour, which reduced the occurrence of the issue, but did not solve it.

    I am in contact with Citect support, but I'd like to hear the opinion of the participants of this forum.
    Please, let me know if you have any suggestions.

    Thanks,
    Igor
Reply
  • Hi everyone,

    Is anyone else experiencing problems with the alarms servers using the December 2020 update?
    Our system consists of 2 redundant I/O, alarm, trend, report servers & 2 display clients as terminal servers. 

    We had the update 23 (Aug 2020) installed in our servers when the recall was announced. The only issue we had noticed at that time was the alarm process not responding during the process restart, so we proceeded with the roll-back to the update June 2020 following the instructions of the recall.

    In January, we created 40 new users in the system due to a request from the operations team. Since then, we started to have "random" problems displaying the alarms. Basically, the alarm page stops being updated in the display using cicode functions AlarmDsp() and AlarmDspLast(). The alarm log device is working fine as well as playing a .wav file when an alarm is active.

    One of the attempts to solve the problem was the installation of the December 2020 update following the regular sequence: 1) primary server; 2) standby server and 3) display clients, but the issue persists.

    We noticed that when an issue occurs, it is possible to return to regular operation when one of the current users logs off. We also tested restarting the alarm process. Sometimes the restart of the process in the standby server is enough, but in other cases we need to restart just the primary. Currently, we are restarting the alarm process of the standby server every hour, which reduced the occurrence of the issue, but did not solve it.

    I am in contact with Citect support, but I'd like to hear the opinion of the participants of this forum.
    Please, let me know if you have any suggestions.

    Thanks,
    Igor
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