Echelon i.LON SmartServer 2.0 - Manual (Page 93)

i.LON SmartServer 2.0 Programmer’s Reference 7-1
7 Alarm Notifier
Use the Alarm Notifier application to log user-defined alarm conditions, and to generate e-mail
messages and data point updates each time an alarm condition occurs. This section provides an
overview of how Alarm Notifiers work, including how you can define alarm conditions and program
your Alarm Notifiers to respond to them.
User-Defined Alarm Conditions
When you create an Alarm Notifier, you will specify a group of input data points. The Alarm Notifier
will read the status of these data points each time they are updated to determine if they have reached
alarm conditions. The statuses that the Alarm Notifier will consider alarm conditions are user-defined.
You will define these conditions by creating active and passive alarm condition sets for the Alarm
Notifier.
For each condition set you create, you will select an alarm type (active or passive) and a data point
status. Each time an input data point is updated and its matches the selected
status, an alarm notification will occur. If it is generated based on a status assigned to an active alarm
condition set, it is considered an active alarm. If it is generated based on a status assigned to a passive
condition set, it is considered a passive alarm. You can create as many active and passive alarm
condition sets as you like per Alarm Notifier.
There are several scenarios you could consider when creating Alarm Notifiers. For example, you
could set up Alarm Notifiers to generate alarm notifications based on the statuses of the data points
updated by your Alarm Generators. For more information on Alarm Generators, see Chapter 6.
You may also recall from Chapter 5 that some data points exist in the Data Server to monitor the
amount of memory that an Alarm Generator’s log file has consumed. You could set up an Alarm
Notifier to generate alarm notifications when a log file becomes full.
Alarm Destinations
You can create destinations for your Alarm Notifiers. These destinations determine how the Alarm
Notifier will respond when an alarm occurs. You can create as many active and passive destination
sets as you like per Alarm Notifier. The passive destination will be used when a passive alarm
notification occurs, and the active destinations will be used when an active alarm notification occurs.
For each destination, you can specify an output data point. This data point will be updated each time
an alarm notification occurs and uses that particular destination. You can also specify an e-mail profile
for each destination. The e-mail profile will cause an e-mail to be sent to an address of your choice
each time the destination is used. The next section provides more information on e-mail profiles.
You can create e-mail profiles and assign these profiles to the destination sets you have created for
your Alarm Notifier. Each e-mail profile contains an e-mail address. When a destination using an
e-mail profile is used, an e-mail will be sent to the address defined for that profile.
You can specify the message text, subject heading, and attachment to be included with each e-mail.
E-mail profiles allow you to notify different people when different alarms occur. This is useful if
different groups of people need to receive notifications about the various alarm conditions that might
occur on your network.
Auto-Generated Log Files
Each Alarm Notifier will generate its own log file. It will add an entry to this log file each time it
generates an alarm notification. You can find these log files in the /root/AlarmLog directory of
the SmartServer. These files are named histlogX, where X represents the index number assigned to the
Alarm Notifier when it was created. An Alarm Notifier will not generate a log file until it has
generated an alarm notification.