Profinet module

PROFINET is an open Industrial Ethernet communication protocol, based on international standards. It is designed to exchange data between controllers and devices, mostly in manufacturing and/or automation environments. Since its introduction in the early 2000s, it has grown to become the most well-adopted Industrial Ethernet solution.

Allegro Network Multimeter facilitates highly granular PROFINET monitoring and PROFINET troubleshooting in real-time and back in time. Packet-based analysis and statistics are available for communication relations, top talkers, bandwidth consumption, jitter, frames, PROFINET errors and alarms (PN-RT, PN-RTA and PNIO-CM).

Allegro Packet’s incident engine allows for automatic reporting of PROFINET alarms and threshold based triggers to e-mail and syslog. Also PROFINET traffic recording and automated event-based PROFINET packet capturing is readily available to you in Allegro Network Multimeter.

Overview

The overview page shows global informations about Profinet traffic.

Devices

The devices tab lists all seen Profinet devices or controllers. You can sort by most of the columns to e.g. quickly find the device with the highest jitter or the most errors.

Device overview

When clicking on a MAC or IP address, the Profinet device overview is shown. This page shows global information about this device.

Communication relations

This tab shows all communication relations of the device. All communication relations are listed where the device took part either as sender or receiver.

Profinet Real-Time (PN-RT)

This tab lists all cyclic RT frames and groups them by frame ID. An error field lists the number all errors extracted from the data and transfer status of every frame. Based on the cycle counter, a loss detection, repeated frames or whenever the cycle counter moves backwards is indicated.

Alarms (PN-RTA)

This tab lists all Alarms (high and low priority).

DCP

This tab lists all DCP (Discovery and Configuration Protocol) frames that were sent from or sent to this device. DCP is used to configure station names and IP addresses.

PTCP

This tab lists all PTCP (Precision Transparent Clock Protocol) frames that were sent from or sent to this device. PTCP is used for time synchronisation.

Profinet over UDP

This tab lists all acyclic CM (Context Manager) frames that where sent over UDP from or to this device. The protocol is used during startup for creation of application and communication relations and allows for acyclic write and read requests between two Profinet devices.

Jitter

For cyclic frames a jitter calculation is performed. The calculation is based on the increment of the cycle counter of two subsequent frames and the timestamps of both two frames as seen by the Multimeter. An error field shows the number of all responses with an error status, the number of not answered requests and the number of responses without a request.

Response times

For acyclic requests in the scope of CM (Context Manager) times are measured between a request and a response (as seen by the Multimeter).