AVEVA Historian troubleshooting: Management Console, IDAS, store-and-forward, disk space and system tags

When an AVEVA Historian trend goes flat or shows a gap, the cause can sit in several places: the Historian services, a data source, a remote IDAS that lost its connection, a storage location that ran out of space, or clocks that drifted apart. AVEVA's Historian documentation gives a tool for each: the Management Console, a set of system tags, the store-and-forward cache, the system message log and the time synchronisation settings. This article puts them in the order we work through a running Historian, based on AVEVA's Historian 2026 documentation. How AVEVA Historian compares with the PI System: AVEVA Historian vs PI System.

1. Start from the Management Console status

In the Operations Control Management Console, the Management Console node of a Historian server shows its status, data acquisition, replication, client connections and history blocks. The Status view gives a snapshot of key system tags:

• the system state, from Server Connecting through Starting and Running to Stopped or Disconnected;
• the licence status, the total number of tags and the number of licensed tags;
• the overall data rate in values per second;
• the counts of fatal errors, critical errors, errors and warnings since the last restart or error reset;
• the space available on each storage path, and the Historian version.

All timestamps in this view are the time of the Historian computer, which can differ from the computer running the console. The licence line matters more than it seems: AVEVA states that without a valid licence Historian keeps acquiring and storing data, but retrieval is limited to 32 tags for the last 7 days, which looks like missing data from the client side.

2. Check each data source

The Data Acquisition view lists every source that feeds the Historian, with the computer, topic, protocol, number of tags, status, values received, rate per second and number of connections. A source whose rate drops to zero while the others keep running points to that source or its path, not to Historian storage. On a tier-2 Historian, the tier-1 Historians appear in this view as sources.

3. Remote IDAS and store-and-forward

A remote IDAS can cache data on its own disk while it cannot reach the Historian. AVEVA's rules for this cache:

• The store-and-forward path must be a valid local path; remote paths are not supported, and an invalid path makes store-and-forward fail.
• Data is written to the path until the minimum free-space threshold is reached; after that no more data is stored and an error is logged.
• Store-and-forward is not available when a failover IDAS is configured.
• After reconnection, the Historian checks the IDAS configuration, then the IDAS sends the cached data together with real-time data and deletes the cache when it is done.

The IDAS logs its errors to the ArchestrA Logger. During a network failure, errors from a remote IDAS do not reach the logger on the Historian computer and are not forwarded afterwards, so the log on the IDAS computer itself has to be checked.

AVEVA's IDAS troubleshooting page describes two common connection faults:

4. Disk space and history blocks

Historian writes history blocks to a circular storage location. When free space on that disk falls below the minimum threshold, or when blocks reach a set age or the location reaches its size limit, the oldest blocks move to the alternate storage location. If no alternate location is configured, they are deleted. AVEVA recommends a minimum threshold about three times the size of the largest history block, and leaves backing up old blocks to the system administrator. The system tags SysSpaceMain, SysSpaceAlt, SysSpaceBuffer and SysSpacePerm report the space left in each path in MB, stored every 5 minutes.

5. System tags worth trending

Historian keeps its own health as tags, so they can be trended or shown on an InTouch screen:

Error counts return to zero at startup and shutdown, and can be reset from the console with Reset Error Counts, so a count is only meaningful together with the time of the last reset.

6. System messages

Historian writes messages to the ArchestrA Logger and, for user actions and exceptional events, to the Windows event log with Historian as the source. Messages carry one of six categories: FATAL stops the process, CRITICAL can cause data loss or corruption, ERROR covers general errors, WARNING and INFO report settings and progress, and DEBUG is for debugging. In the Log Viewer, fatal, critical and error messages appear as errors with the category as a prefix. In Windows Event Viewer, filtering the Application log on the Historian event source shows only Historian messages.

7. Timestamps and clocks

I/O servers that use SuiteLink stamp each value with a time and a quality. Every hour, an IDAS works out the clock difference to each I/O server computer and applies it as a bias to that server's values, without changing the I/O server's clock; the interval is set by the SuiteLinkTimeSyncInterval parameter. The Historian can also synchronise the clocks of remote IDAS computers through the TimeSyncIODrivers parameter. AVEVA recommends synchronising all computer clocks to one time server with standard Windows functions, and does not recommend the Historian-controlled method on slow networks.

Checks we make first

These are TDL's working habits, not AVEVA requirements:

• The exact start and end of the gap, and whether it affects all tags, one data source or one remote IDAS.
• The licence status, before suspecting data loss.
• Free space on the circular storage disk and whether old blocks were moved, deleted or backed up.
• The log on the remote IDAS computer for the period of the gap.

How TDL approaches it

TDL Industrial Automation is listed in AVEVA's Partner Finder as a System Integrator in the AVEVA Partner Ecosystem. We maintain the AVEVA System Platform SCADA at Samsung SEHC under a yearly contract, and integrated a historian with automated reports for the SEHC Admin Building AHU monitoring. Before changing anything on a Historian we record its version, licence status and storage locations. More on historian services: SCADA, HMI and plant data integration.