Notification

As the name suggests, the Notification Block is responsible for actually sending notifications. Each notification block can target one particular notification profile, which represents one method of notification, such as email, sms, or voice. Each type of notification profile will have its own relevant properties for configuration, although some features are common to all profile types. The various profiles will also behave differently, according to their capabilities, in regards to how notifications are ordered. For example, the email profile is capable of sending a message to many recipients at once, while the SMS and voice notification profiles must step through each contact sequentially.

Basic Setup

There are two required settings for notification blocks: the notification profile to use, and the On-Call Roster to use. The profile will dictate the method through which notifications occur, and the roster will dictate who receives the notifications. The call roster provides an ordered list of contacts, which will first be pared down according to each user's schedule. The resulting contacts will be notified in order, based on how the profile operates.

The settings displayed will depend on the type of profile selected.

Email Settings

•	From Address - Email address used for the "from" field.

•	Subject - The subject of the email. May refer to properties of the alarm, such as name, value, etc.

•	Message - The body of the email. Like the subject, may refer to properties of the alarm.

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Consolidated Message - The message sent when consolidation is turned on, and more than one alarm is being sent. Can refer to properties, and additionally support a special expansion syntax of "{{ ... }}", where everything inside of the double curly braces will be repeated for each alarm in the consolidation group.

•	Test Mode - If enabled, logs to the console each time an email would be sent, instead of sending the actual email.

Voice Settings

•	Require PIN - If true, the user will need to enter their PIN in order to hear the alarm notification messages. The user's PIN is defined in the user management section of the gateway. If false, the any user will be allowed to hear the messages after answering.

•	Allow Acknowledgement - If false, users will only be allowed to listen to alarms, not to acknowledge them.

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Delay Between Calls - Introduces a delay between calling each contact, for each alarm. The pipeline dropout conditions are checked regularly between calls and while waiting, so this would provide time for the alarm to drop out before calling the next person. The delay is only enforced after following a "successful" call (a call that was answered). Unanswered or errored calls will move on to the next contact right away. Please note that long delays can block other alarms in the call queue. The delay is applied to all contacts for a particular alarm, so using "fair scheduling" (enabled in the gateway configuration) can help reduce blockage by interleaving different alarm notifications.

•	Test Mode - If enabled, messages will be logged to the console indicating when and to whom calls would have been made, without actually making a call.

SMS Settings

•	Message - The message to use for single events.

•	Consolidated Message - Like email, the message to use when multiple events are sent together, due to the block's consolidation settings.

•	Delay Between Notification - As with voice, a delay between each message sent, to give the recipient time to acknowledge and prevent further notification.

•	Test Mode - If enabled, logs messages that would have been sent to the gateway console, and does not actually send them.

Consolidation

Notification consolidation allows you to limit the number of notifications sent by specifying a delay during which incoming events will be collected. When the delay expires, all events that have arrived during the period of time will be sent together to the notification profile. The manner in which the profile implements consolidation will vary, but in general the result will be a shorter message, or fewer messages, than would have occurred otherwise.

Consolidation is defined with two parameters:

•	Delay - How long to wait after the first eligible alarm arrives for other alarms. In other words, if an alarm comes in and would pass the frequency setting, it will be delayed for this amount of time.

•	Frequency - The max frequency with which the profile can send alarms. This setting works in conjunction with the delay.

The delay is used to protect against situations where an event might generate many alarms together, while the frequency is used to ensure that contacts aren't notified too often, for example if an alarm is rapidly going in and out of the active state.