[00:00] While the previous model for alarm filtering and aggregation allowed users to aggregate alarm metrics at the tag and alarm levels, the advanced alarm subscription model introduced in Ignition 8.3 features built-in tools designed to retrieve aggregated alarm statistics at the folder and UDT level as well. With these tools, users can get data on alarm transitions, count changes, and more, as they happen. Let's start by taking a look at the runtime alarm metric properties that provide a strong foundation for alarm aggregation within Ignition. These alarm metric properties provide multiple ways to access valuable alarm statistics at the tag level for tags that have alarms configured. We'll delve into these properties in greater detail later, but if you'd like more information, please see the link to the Ignition User Manual below this video. To expand the capabilities for alarm aggregation at the folder and UDT levels, Ignition 8.3 exposed those 13 pre-existing metrics as bindable properties in the edit binding window.

[01:16] In addition, a growing library of new alarm metric properties is now available at all levels except the root provider level. These other 15 properties focus on the alarm's live state information and the alarm's priority, and they live in the alarm metrics node at each level. For that reason, the initial configuration of basic alarm properties is fundamental to the way the subscription-based alarm metric aggregation framework functions. For its state value, an alarm can be acked or unacked, clear or active, or enabled versus disabled. You can probably see that best in the alarm status table or in the alarm configuration screen. The newest bindable alarm aggregation properties exclusively focus on the acked, unacked, and active states.

[02:06] There are five available priorities for alarms, too-- diagnostic, low, medium, high, and critical. Let's take a quick look at some examples. First, we'll start with the properties that use the activeCount prefix. The properties with this activeCount prefix help aggregate all active alarms in each alarm priority, regardless of acked or unacked status. So for example, if we set a direct tag binding with active count critical, we could get a count of all the active critical alarms at a glance. Then we have bindable properties that use the unackCount plus priority format. These properties can tell us the number of unacknowledged alarms for a given priority. Last, there are bindable properties that follow the pattern has activeUnacked plus priority. These give give us a boolean that can tell us if all alarms in a certain priority level are acknowledged or not.

[03:05] With these properties, we would see a value of false when there are no active and unacked alarms and true if there are any active and unacked alarms. The main benefit of this subscription system designed for alarm aggregation is improved efficiency and flexibility in data gathering. Since tags are built using a natural hierarchy, we can aggregate all the alarm information that exists under the point we subscribe to automatically. A good example of this principle in action is if we want to use this filtering and aggregation system with a specific folder that contains sub-folders with tags of different priorities like this. I'll put this view into preview mode and acknowledge a few of the critical alarms first. Now we have a mix of different alarms, three of which are active and acknowledged. I want to track alarms at specific priority levels and have a more bird's-eye view of the aggregate alarm data at the individual folder level, so, I'll switch over to this other view.

[04:08] Let's go take a look at how the aggregation bindings work based on priority and state within MyCriticalFolder. I want to add a new direct tag binding to the value property for this LED, so I'll start by clicking on my first component and the chain link icon next to value to bring up the edit binding window. I'll select tag for the binding type, and then I can use the browse tags icon to make finding the right tag path easier. We can expand the tags folder, then MyTagsFolder, open MyCriticalFolder, expand Alarm Metrics and bind the LED to the activeCountCritical property. This just means I'm binding to the critical folder that contains all those priority critical tags and asking the alarm metrics tools to tell me how many active alarms are in that folder with a priority of critical. Our active count critical LED gave us the expected result based on the number of active critical alarms in the alarm status table.

[05:07] With this checkbox, we want to use a simple Boolean value to show whether or not there are active critical unacknowledged alarms in MyCriticalFolder. The property we need to target is hasActiveUnackedCritical. So let's go to the edit binding window for selected. Here we can sift down to MyCriticalFolder, open alarm metrics and select that property from the options. Now, because alarms do exist within the critical folder that are active and unacknowledged, the checkbox appears checked. These properties give us a more specific view of what's going on with individual sub-folders, and there are many different approaches and built-in ways to get the alarm information we need. Now let's get our bird's-eye view of the aggregated tag data in MyTagsFolder. We can use some of the runtime alarm metric properties at the folder level to help aggregate all the alarms that exist within the parent MyTagsFolder quickly and easily.

[06:07] Let's bind this LED to the activeUnackCount property. So we can see the number of alarms that are active, but unacknowledged in the entire MyTagsFolder. I'll click on the LED, and then we can set up a direct tag binding to the alarm metrics within MyTagsFolder. I'll open tags, then MyTagsFolder, expand Alarm Metrics, select activeUnackCount, and click OK. You can see that it's capturing all that alarm data and telling us how many tags are active and unacknowledged in the entire parent folder. Ignition's advanced alarm subscription model makes alarm aggregation data gathering flexible and user friendly. These built-in tools allow the user to retrieve aggregated alarm statistics at the tag, alarm, folder, and UDT levels and enable even greater transparency, responsiveness, and adherence to ISA standards.