Description

Alarm Notification pipelines are the bridge between alarms becoming active or clear to messages being sent out to users. Pipelines are a graphical mechanism for building up logic, providing an easy to use drag and drop mechanism for creating complex notification scenarios.

User Manual: 8.1. Pipeline Blocks

Video recorded using: Ignition 8.1

Transcript

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[00:00] In this video, we are going to take a look at the last two steps of Alarm Notification, which are creating an Alarm Notification pipeline and then adding that pipeline to a tags alarm. This video assumes that we have already created an Alarm Notification profile and an on-call roster of users with contact info. To start, we will go to the Alarm Notification pipeline section of the designer and create a new pipeline. When creating a pipeline, we need to connect multiple pipeline blocks together to create a logical pathway or pipe that the alarm event will follow when it enters the pipeline. The alarm event has two ways that it can leave the pipeline. First, it can reach the end of the pipeline. With nowhere else to go and no other blocks to evaluate, the instance will simply end and the pipeline will sit and wait for the next alarm to come through.

[01:05] The alarm event can also leave the pipeline prematurely by meeting one of the dropout conditions, which are specified on the route of the pipeline. When one of these are met, the alarm event will be removed from the pipeline and will not evaluate any other blocks, even if it has not reached the end. Now, I want to create a simple pipeline. And the simplest pipeline is the one that I have here with just a notification block, which will notify users immediately when the alarm event enters the pipeline. However, I want to add in a delay just before the notification, so that we can see our pipeline in action in the gateway. The delay block that I am adding here will simply hold the alarm event here for the specified amount of time when the alarm event reaches the delay block for evaluation. Once the time has passed, the alarm event will move down the pipeline to the next block, which is a notification block.

[02:06] The notification block allows us to notify our users by first selecting an alarm notification profile that will be used to send out the notifications, and then an on-call roster of users that will be notified. For more information on the other settings in this block or on any of the other pipeline blocks, please see our user manual. This pipeline is ready to go, so let's save it. The next step, which allows us to use this pipeline that we just created, is to go to an alarm and add the pipeline to the alarm. I have a Boolean tag here with an alarm that is triggered when the value is true. If we look at our alarms properties, we will see three properties which will allow us to add a pipeline. Ack, Active, and Clear Pipeline. Setting a pipeline for any of these properties will push the alarm event into the pipeline specified when the alarm transitions to the state listed in the property.

[03:05] So for example, setting an Ack pipeline means that when the alarm is acknowledged, the alarm event will be pushed into the pipeline so that users can be notified that the alarm was acknowledged. For our example, let's set the active pipeline and select the pipeline we just created. We will go ahead and commit this and test it out by triggering the alarm. Now with your pipeline configured, you can see the status of it by going into the Gateway Webpage Status section. Here on the left-hand side, we can navigate to the Alarm Pipelines page, where we will see a list of all of our alarm pipelines that have been created, as well as if they are currently active and how many events are currently moving through them. If we look at the details of the pipeline, we can see where in the pipeline each alarm event is at. As we can see here, the alarm event that was just triggered is still sitting in the delay block.

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