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WinCC – Diagnostics
Initial checks
First things to check, in case of strange problems:

 Are WinCC versions are the same on all stations (same version, same service pack, same
hotfix)?
 Any trace of viruses on the whole system?
 Particularly important in a server-client system, has it been configured strictly following all
Siemens and Danieli Automation guidelines and recommendations?
 Is there a more recent update is available that may solve the issue?
 What has changed after the last time the system was correctly working?
 Try simple tests that may help circumscribe the problem, such as:
o Install same application in another PC station
o Try another application in same PC
o Create new project with minimum necessary content in same PC
o Understand if problem is related to whole application or only certain areas
o Check situation with individual WinCC tasks (ex. alarms, trends, scripts) temporarily
disabled

In case of still having problems, the targets on site are:

1. Know the instruments that provide diagnostics data

2. Know which material prepare to enable further analysis and remote assistance

Local diagnostics
About diagnostics to be performed on site.

Application Diagnostics
WinCC provides an application, ApDiag, that gives information during the runtime session.

The application has the following path:

<root>:\Program Files\Siemens\WinCC\uTools\apdiag.exe

First released: Geatti Enrico July 21, 2016

Last revision: Geatti Enrico April 10, 2018
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This application is to be started before or during a WinCC runtime session, it will gather some
categories of errors issued by WinCC scripts. Show them by choosing “Open” on menu:

A perfectly developed and tuned WinCC application should not present any error message.

When all “developer errors” have been corrected, this tool may still be useful to identify unexpected
errors arising periodically.
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Channel Diagnosis
Start it from Windows Start menu:

This application will give information about each PLC channel communication status:

In case of communication problems it may help to prepare screenshots, with the following strategy:

1. every some time on the same PC Station

2. at the same time in different PC Stations

The target is to be able to compare to identify differences, i.e. when/where communication is

performing well and when/where it is not.
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This tool may help also to understand why some pages stay much time to be completely open:

The item “PLC Tag Subscriptions” counts how many tags there are for each polling cycle in the
present situation (open pages, trends, alarms, etc). The target is to reduce the number of tags that
use high frequency polling (100ms, 200ms) moving them to slower polling (1s, 2s).

Gathering data
Data can be gathered automatically or manually.

Computer configuration (manual)

Prepare a list of all the installed software applications (and versions) and configurations of each PC
station involved on the project.

A fast way to obtain this is to use free tools available online: one possibility is using “Belarc Advisor”,
it will create a report with all the necessary data for the PC station.

Log data (manual)

WinCC creates some logs on each local PC.

The Siemens installation logs are on this folder:

<root>:\ProgramData\Siemens\Automation\Logfiles\Setup

Two files that may be especially useful are:

 Citamis.str
 RASETUP*.LOG

The diagnostic logs are on this folder:

<root>:\Program Files\Siemens\WinCC\diagnose
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The logs may be compared between stations that have different behavior to spot differences.

All this data needs be gathered for each PC station involved on the project, or at least one for each
kind (if the same kind of stations share the same behavior).

SDT – Siemens Diagnostic Tool (automatic)

SDT is a precise purpose tool developed by Siemens that gathers the necessary diagnostic data from
the local PC.

It can be downloaded from Siemens internet site or (but in this case it is not assured to be in latest
version) copied from the Danieli folder:
\\atlasc\Software\DevTools\HMI\Siemens
(WinCC&SimaticNet)\WinCC\Tools\SDT_SiemensDiagnosticTool

It simply consists on an executable file to be locally started on each computer involved in the WinCC
architecture.

The whole gathering operation will take around 10 minutes for each computer, the files are
exported in a sub-folder of where SDT executable has been placed and will contain a ZIP with this
kind of data:

 MSWindows configurations, registry, logs and events

 Siemens applications configurations and logs
 Computer configurations

The ZIP is created with the password “12345678”.

Read the Quick Start Guide released by Siemens for further information.