Why am I missing data?

[Joe Reckamp]

We often get this question in a variety of forms when users either see no data or have gaps in their data set that they don't expect. This article should hopefully give you a bit of a troubleshooting guide for things that you can look for before having to reach out for assistance.

 

Question 1: Can you find the signal/condition or is it completely missing?

If you cannot find the signal or condition by searching in the data tab, it likely means that the data is not yet connected to Seeq. Please reach out to your company's Seeq administrator or champion for assistance in making the datasource connection.

Note: Make sure that when you are searching in the Data tab, that you are not within a tree and all filters are off. If you are unsure of how to adjust these, you can hit the "reset" button to turn off all the filters prior to searching.

 

Question 2: Is the signal giving a red triangle error when added to the display?

Generally a red triangle error with something that usually starts with "Client data source exception" indicates an issue with the datasource. This can be seen for a variety of reasons, the most common of which are:

• Datasource was disconnected
• Remote agent was disconnected
• Tag is not set up correctly in the historian/database/query

If you are seeing red triangle errors on tags that you would expect to be working, the first thing I would recommend doing is checking whether it is specific to the signal or condition or if the entire database is causing issues. You can check this by trending other tags from that same database to see if they are also giving red triangle errors and/or check the datasource connection to see if that datasource is still connected or not.

If you observe this issue, I would recommend reaching out to your company's Seeq administrator or champion to see if there's a known reason for the issue. If there's no known issue and you're the Seeq administrator for your company, reach out to your partner or Seeq support for assistance. Please make sure you attach logs (https://seeq.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/KB/pages/114395156/Viewing+Logs+and+Sending+Log+Files+to+Seeq) to your request as they often have information about the issue that caused the disconnection. If the remote agent disconnected, often a restart will cause the remote agent to reconnect.

 

Question 3: Does the signal have no data with a yellow "i" button in the Details Pane?

The yellow "i" button means that Seeq is not receiving any errors from the datasource. Clicking on the yellow "i" will give more details, but the most common message is "There is no data in your current display range". 

First thing to try is to Zoom out. Try zooming out to a month, a year, or whatever makes sense for your data set. It's also imperative to make sure you are looking at the right time frame. Make sure the month/day/year are appropriate for where you would expect to have changes in your data. If zooming out finds data, but you're displaying gaps in that data set, see Question 4.

If you still cannot find any data, check the raw datasource for data in that same time range. If the datasource is showing data, but Seeq is not, there are a couple of options that will generally require your company's Seeq administrator to troubleshoot:

• Check the connector configuration to ensure that there are no settings that could be filtering out the data.
• If the datasource is a PI collective with multiple members, check that Seeq is connected to the desired member of the collective: https://support.seeq.com/space/KB/113067567/OSIsoft+PI+Connector#PI-Collective-Member-Priority

 

Question 4: Does the signal show data, but there are gaps in the data set (or near now)?

If the data points are all available, but the points are not all connected, that means there is nothing wrong with the datasource connection, but that the interpolation between data points is not as desired. There is much more information about interpolation in the Knowledge Base (https://seeq.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/KB/pages/734560556/Interpolation), but the two most common issues and their solutions are:

• Each signal has a maximum interpolation, which is the maximum amount of time between sample points that it will connect the points. If the length of time between sample points exceeds that maximum interpolation, then a gap will appear in the data. To fix this, if you have access to, you can override the maximum interpolation in Item Properties (see https://seeq.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/KB/pages/141623511/Item+Properties) or by creating a formula similar to the one below, changing out the 7 days for however long is necessary to fill in the gap observed in your data. Please note that having an excessively long maximum interpolation can result in reduced performance for any calculations built on top of that signal.

  $signal.setmaxinterpolation(7d)

• If increasing the maximum interpolation did not fill in the gap in the data (or the maximum interpolation is already long enough), it likely means there is invalid data point(s) in the gap. In this case, invalids can be removed with a formula similar to the one below:

  $signal.validvalues()