Cygnet

Hi all,

I am about to take a Cygnet course and have been searching the internet looking for forums, documentation, etc. but there appears to be nothing but the very limited cygnetscada. com website.

All I can find is one posting in a forum written in 2003 stating that Cygnet is the worst piece of software, nobody uses it, and the documentation/support is horrible.

All of the big oil and gas companies are using it up here now, and there aren't many locals if any that know Cygnet. What are your opinions on Cygnet? Is it super hard to learn? Where are the forums?

Thanks!

Turns out the forum I found the posting in was this one. And the last guy wrote in 2009, stating that he really likes the software and that they are improving the support.

Am still interested on what other's opinions are. And if there are any forums for the software.

Thanks.

Hi Trevor,

my name is Blake and I’ve been integrating CygNet systems for over 10 years first as an integration partner and now as a CygNet employee. I periodically troll through various web forums and came across your post. You have several good questions here neatly bundled into a few sentences and I’m going to attempt to answer all of them.

In general, it seems that documentation and support could always be improved with any product. CygNet takes these two items very seriously and works towards improving in these areas every year. From a personal perspective, I have seen vast improvements over the past 10 years that I have been working with the products. CygNet has made significant investments in these areas over the past several years and I think it shows. From a clinical perspective, I will discuss how to access documentation further down in this post.

I would also like to take the topic of documentation and support and look at it from a different perspective. These things represent access to technical information; however, those are not the only vehicles for obtaining information and assistance. CygNet enjoys the opportunity to establish close relationships with our customers. We do this at the start of the sales process, through the initial training courses, continuing on with providing project assistance with our Professional Services group, and culminating with a multi-tiered support team and continuing education courses.

As with any new system, there is an obvious learning curve. It is human nature to try to assimilate one system’s architecture into another; however, we all know that this is not always the most efficient. Seemingly the more systems you know, the more challenging the task becomes. As you would expect, CygNet has its own fundamental architecture, terminology and concepts that make us unique. It is very important to have a firm understanding of the fundamentals in order to be successful.

When you look across the CygNet customer landscape and see systems with over 15,000 devices, millions of points, thousands of clients and hundreds of servers you gain an appreciation for the flexibility, scalability and reliability of the software offers. When you deal with these enterprise systems, the software needs to be able to handle complex configurations and customer specific issues. As such, there are multiple ways to solve any particular problem. That is why a good understanding of the fundamentals and basics of the software is important. While the fundamentals are not hard to learn, careful care and consideration is need when configuring systems that will scale to those large scale systems. In smaller systems, a bad configuration habit can go undetected; however, when that bad habit is multiplied over large numbers it becomes easier to see. This takes practice and a good understanding of the software. Again, we enjoy working with our customers in helping them think through these situations and help to form good CygNet habits.

As I mentioned earlier, here is some information regarding documentation. Located on the CD Image and also available via version management from a CygNet server, there is a Microsoft Compiled HTML Help file (cygnet.chm). On the CD Image that file is located under DOCS directory and the HELP sub-directory. When version managed from a CygNet server, the file resides in the CygNet directory and the HELP sub-directory in the drive that your clients are version managed to (typically the C drive).

The help file has tons of good information and continues to get more verbose with each release. As you may suspect, this type of help file is more of a reference than a cover-to-cover read. You indicted that you are going to a CygNet training course. That is an excellent place to start to get the base knowledge components down and begin the learning process of CygNet’s terminology.

The training classes afford you the ability of hands-on system configuration coupled with an excellent guided pace from a skilled instructor. On another personal note, I have going through the training courses several times. I always find new nuggets of information from each course, seemingly not matter how many times I attend. This is due to the frame of mind that I’m in when I attend the classes. I may walk in one time with a specific problem, project or area of interest and sometime don’t really absorb the entirety of all the information being distributed. As I mentioned, the concepts are not hard; however, with such a large feature set that CygNet offers there is a lot of knowledge to consume.

What is typical of our industry and of most technically minded people, we like to play and tinker around with the new toys. I have found it very beneficial to couple the formal training courses with the offline tinkering time.

CygNet does have a lot of specific examples for HMI screens and scripts on the server for reference purposes as well. These examples provide useful techniques and guidance when attempting to solve a particular integration task.

In the final analysis, I guess my advice to you would be to talk with us. Ask us how we can help you and your company be successful with a CygNet installation. Talk with us about tools, techniques and procedures that can help you rapidly get a system up and running within a short period of time.

I would be happy to discuss this and any other topic further with you if you would like. Also, feel free to contact me through our phone number listed on our web site. You’ll find me in the phone tree (I’m the only Blake).

I hope this helps a little bit and look forward to hearing more from you.

Blake

Thanks for your time and response Blake.

You have basically confirmed my suspicions. Cygnet is very powerful, and a very good host. But it is pretty technical. You need training and tech support($) as there is no documentation or communities to learn from.

I am excited to learn Cygnet. Do they give you anything to play/tinker with for after attending training? Such as a "limited" install cd, or manuals to further your expertise?

Thanks again,

Trevor