Spy page diagnostics for Niagara virtual components

“Spy page” support was extended to help troubleshoot/diagnose usage of Niagara virtual components. Typical spy usage for Niagara virtuals is against the Supervisor station, which may include many Px views with many bindings to various Niagara virtual components.

Spy page usage is generally considered an advanced activity, and this section may not apply to all users. However, details here may help diagnose issues in Niagara virtual component setup or maintenance.

A Supervisor station is considered a “Niagara Virtuals client” to the various remote JACE stations, which are “Niagara Virtuals servers”. Therefore, in a Supervisor’s spy pages for its NiagaraNetwork, you typically expect large counts for client Niagara Virtual connections under its various stations.

Figure 130 shows a spy session in Workbench launched against a open Supervisor station (right-click, select Spy, then in the Spy Viewer, niagaraNetwork, stations.

Figure 130. Starting spy to look at Supervisor’s usage of Niagara virtual components

This produces a stations list, as shown in Figure 131.

Figure 131. Continuing spy to look at Supervisor’s usage of Niagara virtuals to one remote station

As shown in Figure 131, in the stations list table, under the “Niagara Virtuals Client” column, you can see a count of active Niagara virtual components for each station in the Supervisor’s NiagaraNetwork. If you click on a link in that count column, you see a page of the Niagara Virtual components, by name, including a “Virtual Prop Count” column that lists the number of associated properties for each one (ideally 1 property maximum for each one, for performance reasons).

Finally, as shown near the bottom of Figure 131, if you click a specific Niagara Virtual (by Name link), you see its “Virtual Info” properties, as well as subscription statistics on however many of its properties are currently subscribed (or attempted for subscription).

There is also a “Points/Virtual Server” column near the right side of the spy:/niagaraNetwork/stations page (at top of Figure 131). That column lists the count of active (remote) client subscriptions to components in the station. In a typical Supervisor station, this count will be 0 for each station in its NiagaraNetwork. However, you can open a spy session to any selected JACE station and observe this count, as well as subsequent links in a similar manner as shown in the preceding figures. Investigation on the “JACE” station side may also be helpful in resolving issues.