Some metadata can be used in Analyses, which is helpful, but means constantly running an analysis on static data in order to use it at all in AF, which is inefficient, and we have been told to pull in data as a linked table into AF, which seems unnecessary as the data already exists in the PI environment.
Please allow us to pull in metadata as Attributes in AF, which then makes things much easier to view, check for accuracy, and update, using all of the extra capabilities of AF which are much more robust and easier to use than using Datalink or Builder.
Any attribute can already be used in analysis, so checking for things like missing Engineering Units (even though it is text,) or bad Compression/Exception settings, or anything else could be templatized and automated across the entire system, but not needed just to pull the data in every time there is a change.
It would be nice if these could be made as easy choices as child attributes for any PI Tag attribute. Having them in AF makes it much easier to search and grab all of them for any sort of structure that has been designed in AF at one time, whether it is by equipment type, location, etc.
We currently output the point source of one tag for each of our assets in our health monitoring database, for easier troubleshooting of the interface to which the asset belongs. This means an extra 4450 (and counting) analyses, each of which also auto-backfill upon restart of the service. It's an extra and (should be) unnecessary load.