AVEVA PI Vision: Building Your First Dashboard in 30 Minutes

Real-time visibility into your operations is essential for making informed decisions, identifying issues before they become problems, and optimizing performance. Yet, for many organizations, creating effective operational dashboards has traditionally required specialized skills, significant time investment, and dependency on IT or engineering resources.

AVEVA PI Vision is a web-based visualization tool designed specifically for industrial operations data that empowers users to create powerful, interactive dashboards with minimal effort.

What is AVEVA PI Vision?

AVEVA PI Vision is a self-service, browser-based visualization tool that connects directly to AVEVA PI Server data. It allows you to:

• Create configurable, dynamic displays of your real-time operations data
• Access dashboards from any device with a web browser
• Build and modify displays without programming skills
• Share insights across your organization
• Analyze historical trends and investigate process events

Getting Started: Prerequisites

Before creating your first dashboard, ensure you have:

1. AVEVA PI Vision installed and configured in your environment
2. Access to AVEVA PI Server with relevant operational data
3. User credentials with appropriate permissions
4. A web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.)

Step 1: Accessing AVEVA PI Vision

1. Open your web browser
2. Enter your PI Vision URL in the address bar
3. Log in with your credentials

You'll be presented with the PI Vision home screen, which shows recently accessed displays and may include a search bar and navigation to folders containing shared displays.

Step 2: Creating a New Display

1. Click on the "New Display" button (typically in the upper right corner)
2. You'll now see a blank canvas where you can build your dashboard
3. Save your new display by clicking the save icon and giving it a name (e.g., "Equipment Monitoring Dashboard")

Step 3: Finding Your Data

The next step is to locate the data you want to display:

1. Click on the search icon to open the search panel
2. You can search for data in several ways: Type a tag name or description to search for specific data points Browse through the asset structure if your PI System uses Asset Framework Filter search results by tag attributes to narrow down options

If your organization has implemented Asset Framework (AF), you'll be able to search by asset or equipment name, making it much easier to find relevant data without knowing specific tag names.

AVEVA PI Vision's advanced tag search capabilities allow you to:

• Filter by multiple tag attributes simultaneously
• View descriptions alongside tag names in search results
• See current tag values and timestamps on hover

These features make it much easier to find exactly what you're looking for, even in systems with thousands of data points.

Step 4: Adding Data to Your Display

Once you've found the data you want to display:

1. Simply drag and drop items from the search results onto your display canvas
2. PI Vision will automatically create a default visualization based on the data type
3. Repeat this process for all the data points you want to include

For example, if you're building a pump monitoring dashboard, you might add:

• Flow rate
• Pressure
• Temperature
• Motor current
• Runtime hours

Step 5: Configuring Display Elements

Now it's time to customize how your data is displayed:

1. Click on any element to select it
2. Use the configuration panel that appears to modify the display properties

For each element, you can:

• Change the display type: Switch between value display, gauge, trend, or other formats
• Adjust appearance: Change colors, sizes, and styles
• Configure behavior: Set up multi-state conditions to change color based on values
• Add context: Include titles, units, and descriptions

PI Vision offers a variety of display types:

• Values: For simple numerical or text displays
• Gauges: To show current value within a range
• Trends: For time-series visualization
• Symbols: Graphical representations
• Tables: For displaying multiple values in a structured format
• Multi-state indicators: Visual alerts that change appearance based on conditions

Multistate formatting gives you design flexibility to highlight important values through three options:

• Fill value
• All text
• Status labels

You can also configure elements to hide when there are no active alarms, or to change color to display alarm severity.

Step 6: Organizing Your Dashboard

With your display elements added and configured, now:

1. Arrange elements by dragging them to appropriate positions
2. Resize elements by clicking and dragging their corners
3. Align elements to create a clean, organized layout
4. Group related elements together

Consider organizing your dashboard in a logical flow that matches your operational process or creates clear visual groupings of related information.

Step 7: Adding Navigation and Context

Enhance your dashboard with:

1. Navigation links: Create links to other displays for easy movement between dashboards
2. Asset-based navigation: Configure your display to switch context between similar assets (e.g., from one pump to another)
3. Event frame tables: Add tables showing important events like alarms, batches, or equipment states

These elements transform standalone displays into an integrated navigation system.

Step 8: Testing and Refining

Before sharing your dashboard:

1. Test the display by examining all elements
2. Verify that data is updating correctly
3. Check any multi-state behaviors by looking at historical data with different conditions
4. Make adjustments to layout, colors, or other properties as needed

Step 9: Sharing Your Dashboard

When you're satisfied with your dashboard:

1. Click the "Display Settings" option
2. Under sharing options, select users or groups to grant access
3. Choose appropriate permissions (View, Edit)
4. Save your changes

Your dashboard is now available to the selected users, who can access it through their own PI Vision interface.

Beyond Your First Dashboard

Once you've created your first dashboard, you can explore more advanced features:

• Ad-hoc Analysis: Select elements from your display and perform on-the-fly analysis
• Event Comparison: Compare similar events side by side to identify patterns
• Calculations: Create calculated values using expressions directly in PI Vision
• Collaborative Displays: Grant write access to multiple users to build displays together
• Mobile Access: Access your dashboards from smartphones and tablets

Real-World Success Stories

Companies across industries have transformed their operations using AVEVA PI Vision:

• Western Power Distribution installed video walls with PI Vision displays providing real-time operational awareness across their entire transmission network. This helped operators gain insight into rapidly changing conditions and make better predictions about customer usage.
• General Atomics Aeronautical Systems set up PI Vision displays with color-coded alarms to monitor temperature and humidity in real-time inside paint booths for drones. The immediate visual feedback allowed operators to spray sooner, which increased production speed.
• TransCanada, with 57,100 miles of natural gas pipeline, built a platform on AVEVA PI Vision to deliver data on over 800 units across North America to their 7,500-member operations team. They were able to deploy this system across their entire enterprise in just a 3-month timespan.

Wrapping up

In just 30 minutes, you can create a powerful, interactive dashboard that provides real-time visibility into your operations. AVEVA PI Vision makes this possible through its intuitive, self-service approach to visualization that doesn't require programming skills or extensive training.

As you become more familiar with the tool, you can create increasingly sophisticated displays, incorporate advanced analytics, and build an integrated visualization ecosystem that spans your entire operation.

The self-service nature of PI Vision means that the people closest to your operations can create exactly the views they need, when they need them, without waiting for IT support or specialized resources. This democratization of data access is a key component of building a data-driven culture and unlocking the full value of your operational data.

Whether you're monitoring a single piece of equipment or an entire enterprise, AVEVA PI Vision gives you the tools to transform your operations data into actionable insights at the speed your business demands.