Tetra UNICORN Agent Release Notes (v3.7.1 and Below)

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NOTE

As newer versions of Agents are released, their release notes will appear here.

This document provides the Tetra UNICORN Agent release notes. Release notes are organized by version number.

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NOTE:

To upgrade the Tetra UNICORN Agent, see this document.

Version 3.7.1

RELEASE DATE: 4/12/2023

What's New?

TetraScience has released its next version of the Tetra UNICORN Agent version 3.7.1. This release is a patch to address the requirements to reduce the number of OPC HDA connects (and hence UNICORN system audits) the agent makes as part of the generation job.

For more details, review these sections:

• New Functionality
• Enhancements
• Bug Fixes
• Deprecated Features
• Known and Possible Issues
• Upgrade Considerations
• Miscellaneous

New Functionality

There are no new functionalities for this release.

Enhancements

There are no new enhancements for this release.

Bug Fixes

The bug fixes for this release appear below.

• The Agent uses OPC HDA protocol to connect to UNICORN. When the Agent establishes or terminates its connection to the OPC HDA service, the UNICORN software generates log entries in the UNICORN System Audit Trail to record these log-on and off activities. As the Agent operates as a continuous Windows service, it continuously polls the UNICORN software to detect new or updated files. This frequent polling can result in a significant number of entries being created in the UNICORN System Audit Trail within a short period of time. Agent 3.7.1 optimizes the usage of OPC HDA connections to minimize the number OPC HDA connections the Agent will make to UNICORN for the result file generation operation; resulting in also minimizing the System Audit trails that will be generated. The Agent handles result generation in batches with each batch generation requiring one OPC HDA connection and creating one set of log-in and log-off UNICORN System Audit Trail. A new user setting called Result Generation Batch Size is added to the Agent management console UI with default value of 1000. Based on user’s result files and latency requirements, this value may be tweaked higher or lower. To learn more about how this and other settings can be used to tweak latency and number of HDA connections, see here.

Deprecated Features

There are no deprecated features for this release.

Known and Possible Issues

There are no known issues for this release.

Upgrade Considerations

If upgrading from 3.6 or earlier, and the Detect Changes configuration is enabled, please not now the unit for the setting is days (in 3.6 or earlier it was months). The agent will multiply the months value with 30 and put that as the new value in days. If you want to configure a different value in days, please configure this after the upgrade.

Miscellaneous

There are no miscellaneous topics for this release.

Version 3.7.0

RELEASE DATE: 8/3/2022

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NOTE:

Please upgrade to this version if you are using version 3.6.0

This topic provides information on enhancements, bug fixes, deprecated features, as well as minor functionality changes for version 3.7.0 of the Tetra UNICORN Agent.

Enhancements

Enhancements are new features and functionality that have been added to the software. The following have been added for this release.

• AG-1986/AG-2067 - There are performance improvements because we are now reusing the OPC connection. Also, more performance metrics are now available in the agent log.
• AG-2066 - The agent now considers the Evaluation Logbook entry date to determine whether a result should be verified for changes. Either the Result Creation Date or the Evaluation Logbook entry date (whichever is earliest) will be used for change detection. If historical UNICORN results are reimported to a UNICORN server, the change detection interval will correctly identify which historical files must be generated.
• AG-2187 - The Evaluation Logbook entry date is now retrieved for every result file to be persisted in SQLite database so that it can be used for comparing changes to result files later on.
• AG - 2103 - The Windows Management Console now shows the “Evaluation Log Book Change”, “Evaluation Note Change” and “for results created in last .. day(s)” fields together on one line.
• AG - 2130 - Changed the “Detect Changes… for results created in last” unit from “month(s)“ to “day(s)“. When upgrading from a previous version of UNICORN Agent, if this value is already specified in months, the new value will be updated to “Previous Value” * 30 automatically (e.g. if months was set to 2, the new value will be 60 days).

Bug Fixes

The following are bug fixes that were made for this version of the agent software:

• AG-2065 - This version addressed the performance issues that occured when the address space in UNICORN Agent was updated then reduced to a smaller scope. Before this version, uneccessary performance delays occured because the agent continued to look at all results scanned from previous address space and recorded it in the SQLite database in the generation job.
• AG-2148 - UNICORN OPC HDA provides values of date fields (result creation date, method creation date, and method last modification date) in UTC time zone. Previously, date fields were presumed to be in the Agent machine’s local time zone and were converted to UTC time zone while persisting to RAW JSON. But, if the Agent machine was not in UTC time zone, there was an unintended time change for the date fields in the RAW JSON because the Agent would add/subtract the time difference between the machine’s time zone and UTC. The UNICORN Agent now no longer attempts to convert the date/time received from OPC HDA to local time zone of the Agent machine before persisting them to RAW JSON. See below if you are upgrading from a previous version of the agent and want to re-upload the result files to address this issue.
• AG-2231 - This version addressed the issue of certain curves (e.g. fraction) missing in the RAW JSON extract as a result of some attributes not fetched correctly for those curves through OPC HDA. The “fraction”, “injection” and “run log” sections of the result are extracted even if OPC HDA returns certain attributes (e.g. TimeInt) for such sections as E_FAIL (meaning error in or does not exist in UNICORN). See below if you are upgrading from a previous version of the agent and want to re-upload the result files to address this issue.

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Post Upgrade steps for AG-2148/AG-2231

For Agents getting upgraded from previous versions, post upgrade steps to re-generate previously uploaded data:

• Is the Unicorn Agent machine time zone not UTC or UNICORN Agent 3.6 was used to generate result files with fractions, injection, and run log curves?
  • If yes, then:
    • Assess and disable any UNICORN related pipeline(s) in TDP.
    • Re-upload the results using the “Re-upload” option for all address spaces configured in the Agent.
    • From the “Summary” section of the Agent, check and verify the results are scanned, generated and uploaded.
    • Enable the Unicorn related pipeline(s) if they were disabled in the first step.
  • If no, then no further steps are needed

Deprecated Features

There are no deprecated features for this release.

Minor Functionality Changes

There are no minor functionality changes.

Known Issues

• Due to a bug in the OPC HDA interface of UNICORN, the Peak "Start" and Peak "End" have the same value. The workaround to address this is to calculate the Peak End as Peak Start + Peak Width (both values are present in "PeakTable" object in UNICORN and RAW JSON).

Version 3.6.0

RELEASE DATE: 6/2/2022

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Note:

This release has a bug which prevents certain curves to be correctly extracted from UNICORN. Please upgrade to version 3.7.0 and do not use this version.

This topic provides information on enhancements, bug fixes, deprecated features, as well as minor functionality changes for version 3.6.0 of the Tetra UNICORN Agent.

Enhancements

Enhancements are new features and functionality that have been added to the software. The following have been added for this release.

• AG-1153 - There were minor changes to wording to make the interface easier to understand. See the table below for details.

• AG-1361 - You can now specify a local user account in the Tetra UNICORN Agent. Doing this allows you to limit access to that user account’s files.

Bug Fixes

The following are bug fixes that were made for this version of the agent software:

• AG-1645 - When the UNICORN Agent has an OPC-related error, within a few seconds it will try up to two times to fetch the data from OPC. If it cannot fetch the data, an error is placed in the log indicating it has failed.

Deprecated Features

There are no deprecated features for this release.

Minor Functionality Changes

There are no minor functionality changes.

Version 3.5.0

RELEASE DATE: 31 August 2021

This topic provides information on enhancements, bug fixes, deprecated features, as well as minor functionality changes for version 3.5.0 of the Tetra UNICORN Agent.

Enhancements (New Features and Functionality)

There were several enhancements in this version of the software.

• The user can choose the business rules that trigger the result file regeneration/reupload.
• The user can regenerate/re-upload the result files in a date range.

Deprecated Features

• Removed Excluded Folder section, which contains Logbook and Systems, from UNICORN Path Editor UI. This was because these are the special folders defined in the UNICORN address space. They don't contain valid result files. The Tetra UNICORN Agent has already excluded those folders internally so it doesn't need to be displayed in the UI.

Version 3.4.0

Enhancements

• Avoid generating incompleted Raw file by deferring the generation when that Result file related Method run has not completed yet.

Version 3.3.0

Enhancements

• Support various Data Connection options
• Add Agent Summary page to show the processing progress
• Send Agent system metrics to the Data Platform

Version 3.2.0

Enhancements

• Optimize the algorithm to detect the new Result files through GE Opc HDA Service
• Provide an option Allow Restart HDA Service on Management Console UI to allow the Agent to restart the OPC HDA service if the OPC HDA service is not accessible.
• Provide an option Detect changes for last (Month) on Management Console UI to specify the earliest Result files from which the Agent should detect the change.

Version 3.1.0

Enhancements

• Improve Agent stability
  Enhance the Agent to properly handle the GE OPC HDA connection constraint.

• Improve Exception Handling
  Log the Result File Name which has output issue for reporting and troubleshooting

• Enhance Log Message
  Output summarized Agent processing status for easy monitoring and troubleshooting.

Version 3.0.1

Bug Fix

• Fix issue of Agent Installer which references a wrong version of System.Net.Http

Version 3.0.0

New features and functionality changes

• Add Windows-based Management Console UI to replace config.json for configuration

• Support both GDC (Http and Https) and UDI (Using TetraScience API Key)
• The output files from UNICORN Agent AE Service are removed after the files are successfully uploaded to the platform
• Retain the last 72 hours Agent log files to save disk space.
• If the Agent is upgraded from the version earlier than v2.6.0, the UNICORN HDA files will be reuploaded the platform. That is due to the logic change of how to determine the result file is updated.

Enhancements

• Improve Installation package to completely remove the previous version.

Other changes

Installation

• Starting the agent from the command line is no longer officially supported.
• When a new version of the agent is installed, the old agent (Windows service) is uninstalled automatically. After the installation is complete, the user must run the GUI to resume the agent.
• In migration, if the config.json from the previous version is incomplete, the Agent migrates the sections available in the config.json file
• In migration, if the config.json from the previous version is invalid or missing, the Agent sets up configuration using default values.
• At the minimum time interval as 10 seconds

Configuration

• The default output folder of HDA service is set as C:\Temp
• The default output folder of AE Service is set as C:\Temp\Output for output and C:\Temp\Archive for archiving respectively.