Alarm Notification Module: Stay In The Know, Even On The Go

Looking for powerful alarm management software to build smart and effective alarm systems? Inductive Automation's own Travis Cox explains how easy it is to use the Ignition Alarm Notification Module to set up notifications that prevent downtime and keep your operations up and running.

Transcript:

00:06
Travis Cox: The Alarm Notification Module for Ignition allows you to notify people when various alarms occur in Ignition. The module allows you to build custom logic for how you wanna handle alarms through a simple drag-and-drop interface that provides a lot of functionality. The Ignition platform provides the core of an alarming, which is the ability to define alarms on tags, get the status of those alarms, and log history. The alarm notification module specifically adds two distinct areas to Ignition. First, an Ignition gateway configuration page, you get the ability to define notification profiles, that's where you could define email, SMS, and voice. The Alarm Notification Module has built an email notification. There's additional modules for SMS, and for voice, and for Twilio.

00:48
Travis Cox: You also get the ability to define on-call rosters, which are groups of people that are gonna receive alarms, and you can define schedules for when people are gonna get notified. The second area that gets added to Ignition is in the designer, and that is perhaps the most important part of Alarm Notification Module, which are the alarm notification pipelines, the pipelines are what connect alarms to people, and this is where you build your logic for how you wanna handle alarms, you can see an example here of how we can escalate alarms, where if somebody's not handling it and gets cleared to supervisors or high level people, there's also another example of the Priority Alarm where we can filter alarms based on priority and send higher prior alarms to supervisors and lower priority alarms to other people, and there are lots of building blocks to build the logic any way that you want, and these blocks are fundamental to how that logic is handled, you can see all those building blocks right here, there are a blocks for notifying people, there are blocks for waiting more delaying there are switch statements, there's expression statements to provide your own logic and to do filtering of alarms.

01:46
Travis Cox: There's the ability to jump or escalate to different alarm notification pipelines, and there's even the ability to specify your own custom logic through Python scripting. The Alarm Notification Module also allows you to define your own custom messages, you could do that on the pipeline level or on each alarm individually.

02:00
Travis Cox: Another really important feature of the alarm notification module is the ability to console the alarms, you can have a lot of alarms that occur at the same time, and instead of getting lots of individual emails or text messages, you can have one message that numerates all alarms that are currently active, the module allows you to define your own rosters and these are groups of people that are gonna receive alarms, these rosters can be static or they can be dynamic, and you can specify in the alarm notification pipeline who is gonna receive different kinds of alarms. The module also lows you to define schedules, which are when people are gonna receive alarms, so for example, you create a schedule from Monday to Friday from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. You can create a shift A or a shift B schedule, and the idea is that people want to get notified when they're currently on that schedule, so if they're at home, they're not gonna get the notification.

02:44
Travis Cox:The schedules can also observe holidays, so you can pause notifications when people are on holiday, but of course, we all know that we have to send those notifications out all the time. The Alarm Notification Module is a really powerful module that allows operator supervisors to stay connected to their process by getting those notifications.

03:00
Travis Cox: Oh, look, I actually got a few notifications myself that I gotta handle. Try the alarm notification module on today by downloading the free trial of Ignition.