This lesson is part of the Alarming in Ignition course. You can browse the rest of the lessons below.

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Description

Grouping alarms in Ignition is an important concept so you can view alarms for a particular area of your plant or for a specific set of alarms.

Video recorded using: Ignition 8.1

Transcript

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[00:00] In this lesson, we will explore the different ways alarms can be grouped in ignition. Alarm grouping is useful when it comes to the filtering of alarms in any of the alarm visualization components ignition offers. Such as the alarm status table, or the alarm journal table. Here in my tag browser, I have various folders each containing some tags with alarms configured on them. On the right, you will find the perspective alarm status table, where all my alarms in their different states, can be seen. What if I wanted a way for my alarm status table to only show alarms from any of my motors. I could use the status tables display path filter, and set it to say, M followed by a wild card symbol. Now, I will only see alarms that have a display path that starts with the letter M.

[01:04] Similarly, if I set it to, T followed by my wild card symbol again, I will only see alarms with a display path that starts with a letter T. Here, I am basically grouping my alarms based on their display path. I can also group my alarms and filter them on my status table using the tags, source path. The source path includes the actual path to the tag in my tag browser. So, let's say for example, that I only wanted to see alarms in the section A folder in my tag browser. I can set the status tables source path filter to wild card, section A, followed by another wild card. And after I do that, you will notice that my table only shows my single trigger A alarm, which is within my section A folder. Aside from grouping and filtering alarms, based on their display path and their source path, we can also group alarms based on what we call alarm associated data.

[02:10] Alarm associated data allows you to define a custom alarm property that you can use in your alarm grouping. For example, let's say we want all our motor alarms to be grouped together. I will head over to my UDT definitions tab, double click on my motor UDT, and select my Amps tag to see its configuration. I will now scroll down and head to the alarm section where I will click on the little pencil here to see the alarms configured on this tag. I will select my alarm, and using this little plus sign here, I can add alarm associated data to this alarm. I could double click on it like so, and name it whatever I want. I'm gonna name it, group. For its value, I can either set it to be a static value, or I can use the chain link icon to bind it to anything I want and make it dynamic.

[03:09] For this example, I will simply set it to be group A. Now, I can use this custom alarm property that I just created and filter alarms based on its value, which is independent from my alarms display and source paths. In future lessons, we will explore how we can use these different grouping methods to filter alarms in our different alarming visualization components.

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