Windpark Manager. Brochure. A Comprehensive, Integrated Solution for Technical Operations Management of Wind Parks

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1 Brochure Operations Bridge Business Value Dashboard Windpark Manager A Comprehensive, Integrated Solution for Technical Operations Management of Wind Parks

2 Brochure Windpark Manager The Challenge: Achieving Economies of Scale in Managing Large Fleets of Wind Turbines Cost pressures in wind energy markets are increasing dramatically, and wind park operators must drive down operational costs and increase efficiency to compete. Managing larger fleets of turbines should create opportunities for achieving economies of scale. Unfortunately, this goal has been elusive for most operators due to the lack of management solutions that truly scale to support management of large, geographically distributed, and heterogeneous fleets. Micro Focus Windpark Manager (WPM) is the solution to this challenge. WPM enables operators of large, multi-vendor, globally distributed fleets of wind turbines to capitalize on these economies of scale, increasing the efficiency of technical operations teams and reducing maintenance and repair costs. Major Difficulties Are Preventing the Efficient Management of Large Turbine Fleets Fleets of heterogeneous turbine models and corresponding IT systems Management of turbines deployed across many geographically dispersed sites even across continents Manually-intensive diagnosis of issues and resolution of disruptions Cost-effective staffing for 24/7 operations Minimizing and optimizing expensive on-site visits to the wind parks Lack of substantial provision for security and compliance The Path to Achieving Scale To respond to cost pressures and address the difficulties mentioned above, technical operations teams must drive improvements in two key areas: Dramatically increase efficiencies in technical operations management processes in remote operations centers Expand the scope of management tasks that can be performed reliably from remote operations centers To succeed in these areas, operators must have a comprehensive picture of the real-time health of their wind parks with visibility into all relevant components, from different turbine models to wind park IT and all consolidated into a single technical operations cockpit. The management solution should have access to all metrics, events, and alarms from relevant components, so that it can intelligently correlate data, automatically determine the root cause, prioritize and filter events, and provide action mechanisms to resolve issues more rapidly than ever before. This enables operations staff to quickly make sense of the information presented, fully investigate problems from the remote operations center, and significantly increase their productivity. Such a solution drives down operations costs in two primary ways: Cost of technical operations is reduced directly: a significantly larger fleet of turbines can be managed by a given technical operations team Cost of maintenance and repair is reduced due to the better insight and control available at the remote operations center: this decreases the need of expensive on-site visits and enables more efficient bundling of on-site visits for maintenance and repair Figure 1. Windpark Manager overview The Solution: Windpark Manager Windpark Manager (WPM) is a comprehensive solution for technical operations management of wind parks. It accelerates and automates technical operations workflows and enables wind park operators to manage a larger fleet of turbines with the same technical operations team. The included Business Value Dashboard (BVD) provides operators and business executives with a real-time, tablet-ready display of wind park status and performance, delivering unprecedented visibility into the health of the operation. 2

3 WPM Is Engineered to Support Technical Operations for Large Fleets of Wind Turbines The solution enables integrated management of turbines and wind park IT by providing: A consolidated view of all relevant components in a wind park, from turbines to IT and network components, including security data Automatic discovery of these components, including their relationships and dependencies(topology) Intelligent, scalable event management, including sophisticated correlation and filtering capabilities leveraging topology information Real-time performance analytics, graphing and reporting Real-time, tablet-ready executive dashboards that combine operations and business data and can easily integrate external data sources Organizational scalability : Management concepts that support the organizational setup and work processes of large, geographically distributed operations groups Foundational management of wind park security Reliable management solution providing secure and guaranteed transport of information, as well as initial security monitoring Data storage for compliance purposes Key Capabilities of Windpark Manager Integrated Management of Turbines, IT and Security Automatically identifying, prioritizing, analyzing, and remediating incidents in wind parks significantly reduces the amount of time spent by technical operations teams. However, consolidating events from wind parks into a single event stream proves difficult in many cases. One challenge is that different silos, such as teams dedicated to managing different turbine models, monitor events use their own tools and processes. And park IT is either managed by yet another set of tools, or not systematically managed at all. This leads to significant duplication of effort in technical operations. Because there is no consistency from one operator or team to another, they typically collaborate using manual processes. In addition, because separate tools do not work together, tasks that could otherwise be automated are not. Windpark Manager uniquely addresses these challenges. It dynamically and automatically discovers and correlates three sets of data: topology data that ties together all relevant objects present in wind parks including IT objects, event data, and metrics that describe the availability, performance, and output generated of key park elements. Windpark Manager also monitors the health status of software applications running in the wind park, like SCADA or other software systems. And since all management data is consolidated and correlated into a single modern operations console, the administration burden typically associated with managing events is significantly reduced. WPM includes a logical wind turbine model which represents all turbines and their subcomponents. The solution automatically maps these, such as drive trains or gearboxes, as well as IT elements in the wind park, such as networking equipment. It also understands the relationships and dependencies between these objects (topology), which enables intelligent, automatic event correlation. Lastly, WPM monitors the security status of the IT components in the wind park, and encrypts all communication paths within the solution, providing a level of security rarely seen in the industry. Scalable Event Management Windpark Manager provides a consolidated view of wind parks via a single, modern Web-based user interface. This helps to decrease duplication of effort, increase collaboration across teams, and improve mean time to recovery (MTTR), all of which promote more efficient utilization of operations staff. In addition, operations teams can easily access customized visual representations of an event s impact to determine which activities to work on first based on prioritization levels, therefore increasing their efficiency in handling incidents. 3

4 Brochure Windpark Manager Once the cause of an incident has been identified and prioritized, it is important to enable technical operations staff to address resolution of the issue in a consistent manner and, whenever possible, in an automated fashion. When manual activities are required, WPM provides operators with a number of incident management tools, workflows and cross domain performance graphing, to guide and speed their activities, including instructions and knowledge-base links, which are embedded directly within events. Since event correlation rules are based on configuration item (CI) types, not on component instances, they can be automatically applied to each new CI as WPM dynamically discovers and captures it and its interrelationships. There s no need to update event correlation rules according to the changes in the managed environment. This significantly decreases the effort for ongoing rule maintenance. These facilities, along with automated incident resolution, promote streamlined and consistent incident management, and reduce errors, rework, and incident escalations. The ultimate outcomes are higher operator productivity, more time for expert staff to work on strategic initiatives, and a reduction in cost of technical operations. Multiple Event Correlation Techniques When managing large fleets of wind turbines, one of the biggest challenges is how to manage the large number of events that originate from the different objects in wind parks. Event correlation plays a vital role in automatically reducing the noise and allowing technical operations staff to focus on those issues that really matter. WPM correlates events automatically using the following forms of event correlation: Suppressing duplicate events by showing only one event, with a counter of how many arrived Closing negative events automatically when a corresponding positive event appears Minimizing the amount of events by stream-based event correlation (SBEC) Root cause analysis by topology-based event correlation (TBEC) In addition, because all correlation rules can be freely configured by users, WPM customers are able to adapt to changing operational requirements without the need to change the software. Figure 2. Windpark Manager Event Browser Suppressing Duplicate Events A new event may be a duplicate of an existing event. As new events are received, they are checked against existing events. If duplicates are found, new information, such as a change in severity, is used to update the existing event. The advantage of correlating events using duplicate event suppression is that it reduces the number of events displayed in the console without losing any important information. Closing Related Events Automatically A new event can automatically close one or more existing events. When a new event arrives, a search is made for existing related events. Some specific information contained in the new event is used to match the new event to any existing events, and the new event closes the existing event. Stream-Based Event Correlation (SBEC) SBEC uses rules and filters to identify commonly occurring events or combinations of events. It simplifies and accelerates event management by automatically identifying events that can be withheld or removed, or need a new replacement event to be generated and displayed to the operators. 4

5 The following types of SBEC rules can be configured: Repetition rules: Frequent repetitions of the same event may indicate a problem that requires attention. Combination rules: A combination of different events occurring together or in a particular order indicates an issue and requires special treatment. Missing recurrent rules: A regularly recurring event is missing. For example, a regular heartbeat event does not arrive when expected. Intuitive, Powerful User Experience Customizable Visual Presentations Efficiency of technical operations is increased when the human interface of tools is simpler. WPM enables the fast construction of individual views in which operations staff can typically group information specific to their priorities, giving them personalized, at-a-glance perspectives on these without the need for any programming and maintenance. Since domain experts with differing responsibilities will use their own operational view, though based on the same database and correlation engine, a common version of the truth of the wind park health is established, vastly improving overall operational efficiency. Mobile Access via Tablets and Smart Phones Technical operations staff may need to perform tasks from anywhere, on a mobile device. WPM simplifies access and renders its power through modern, colorful interfaces. Operators can visualize events, drill down to health views, and execute actions to repair issues. Executives and board members can discuss whilst examining views of the wind park operational status and historical data. Better decisions can be made faster and more collaboratively. Figure 3. Windpark Manager console with topology and health view Topology-Based Event Correlation (TBEC) TBEC utilizes detailed, comprehensive, and automatically updated discovery and relationship information to analyze alerts and events, and ultimately determine the event that is most likely the cause of an incident. Operators are presented with a clear representation of which event they need to investigate and what symptoms can be ignored. With TBEC, there is less need to guess at the cause of an incident or spend time chasing symptoms, so the technical operations staff can fix issues faster and handle more incidents. Example: False Turbine Alarms Due to IP Switch Down If an IP switch in the wind park goes down, the turbines connected to this IP switch cannot be reached any more and this will cause false alarms for these turbines. Based on the automatically discovered topology of the wind park, WPM will use topology-based event correlation to determine that the IP switch being down is the root cause. The turbine alarms are just symptoms related to this root cause and will automatically get filtered out of the event browser. An automatic action can automatically re-start the IP switch. Real-Time Performance Analytics and Graphing WPM provides real-time performance analysis and graphing of hundreds of metrics from managed objects in the wind park. Users can build and combine different status and metrics information into powerful dashboards that can be easily and quickly tailored into domain or context-specific dashboard mash-ups. As the graphical designs are free for anyone to specify, the captured management information can be displayed anywhere, in any color and at any place in the cascading dashboards. Business Value Dashboards (BVD) The BVD provides an executive overview, exploiting the wealth of available status and KPI data in a fully configurable representation. External information can be easily embedded, including live streams of TV channels and other multimedia. The BVD is accessible from any device with a browser, including tablets and mobile phones. Different views can be developed by anyone using simple office productivity tools, such as Microsoft Visio, making the design flexible to build and tailor, and very fast to deploy. 5

6 Brochure Windpark Manager Example: Follow the Sun to Manage Wind Parks across Geographic Locations Large operators manage wind parks across multiple continents. Technical operations centers may be located across continents as well to manage wind farms in their respective region. Using the synchronization and hand-over capabilities that are part of the manager-of-manager capabilities of WPM, operators can implement a follow-the-sun scheme for 24/7 operations. Figure 4. Business Value Dashboard example, combining operational and business data from WPM with external data sources Scalability to Support Large Environments and Complex Organizations WPM is based on management software components that are proven to scale: it is managing extremely large and complex environments, including the distributed IT environments of many Fortune 1000 companies. In such large environments, scalability is not only a question of raw performance and throughput. A management solution also needs to support the organizational setup and work processes of large, geographically distributed operations groups. Key features of WPM that solve these organizational scalability challenges include: User role concepts that make it easy to define and delineate areas of responsibility for members of technical operations teams Integration with LDAP to ensure accurate, up-to-date user account information Manager-of-manager concepts that support forwarding of incidents between multiple instances of the WPM server. This enables management for very large environments where different operations teams can use different WPM servers, yet incidents can still be routed to other teams as required Follow-the-sun capabilities to enable 24/7 management around the globe with handover of open events and activities For example, a wind park operator running three technical operations centers one located in the US, one in Europe, and one in Asia would not need to staff all three operations centers in a full 3-shift model. Instead, the operator could lengthen the day shift at each remote operations center. Once the day shift ends in the US, the main operations responsibility for wind farms in the Americas would follow-the-sun and be handed over to the operations center in Asia, and even later in the night, it would be handed over to the operations center in Europe, and return to the US the next morning. This model allows reduced staffing levels for night shifts, thus saving costs and reducing the potential for human errors, which happen more frequently at night. Security Foundational Management of Park Security WPM includes full management of IT components in wind parks, including network devices, and monitors their security status and behavior. This improves wind park IT security significantly compared to the status quo in which IT components in wind parks often are not managed at all. For example if someone installs a network router in a wind park without authorization, this rogue router could stay undetected and undisturbed for a long time in today s wind parks. However, with WPM, the built-in network discovery would reliably detect and flag such a new network device. Also, through the logfile scanning of WPM, intrusion attempts such as repeated, unsuccessful login attempts to wind park systems check tense be detected. See also next chapter below on WPM internal security. 6

7 Reliable, Scalable Management Solution WPM itself has a multi-tier architecture comprised of intelligent software agents collecting the data and one or multiple management servers (console). One server can handle thousands of agents, extraordinary scalability is achieved by implementing multiple instances of management consoles in either a manager-of-managers for a follow-the-sun concept. We recommend that at least one instance of the WPM agent software (collection station) is deployed within each wind park. In that case, WPM implements a reliable guarantee of the delivery mechanism for the management information, even if the network connection between the wind park and the remote operations center is temporarily down. All communication paths in WPM are secure and encrypted. This includes the communication between WPM agents and servers, between servers (manager-of-managers), and between the WPM server and the user interfaces. Learn More At microfocus.com/opsbridge 7

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