Alarm Notification

Alarm notification is the act of sending a message to a group of people when an alarm becomes active or clear. In Ignition, this functionality is enabled by having the Alarm Notification Module installed. This functionality was introduced in Ignition 7.6, replacing the legacy "alert notification" system.

Alarm Notification Profiles

A notification profile defines a delivery channel through which an alarm notification message may be sent to  a user. The Alarm Notification Module comes with one-way and two-way email notification profiles. The one-way email notification profile simply sends an email containing the alarm notification message. The two-way email notification profile sends an email that contains links that allow that user to acknowledge the alarm(s).

Additional modules may be added to Ignition to enable more ways to send alarm notification messages. The Phone Notification Module adds the ability to notify users by calling them on the phone. The SMS Notification Module adds the ability to send text messages to users to notify them of alarms.

On-Call Rosters

An on-call roster is an ordered grouping of users. These are used as a way to group users together so that alarms can be sent out. Depending on the alarm notification profile used, the users may be notified one at a time (sequential), or all at once (parallel). You can create and manage on-call roster from the Gateway configuration page.

Schedules

The alarm notification system uses the user scheduling system that is built-in to Ignition. Alarm notification messages will only be sent to users whose schedule is currently active. When an alarm notification message reaches a notification block in a pipeline, that block's on-call roster will be used to find the users to notify. Of the users in the roster, only those users whose schedule is currently active will receive the alarm notification message.

Alarm Notification Pipelines

These pipelines define the logic of what should happen between an alarm becoming active (or clear), and people being notified. Pipelines are configured in the Designer, but you'll need to configure at least one alarm notification profile and at least one roster in the Gateway before you can configure a valid pipeline.