Alarms

Alarms are events that need immediate attention of the user or operator. Alarms are only useful if they are manageable and meaningful. An alarm will be triggered when a certain condition is happening.

Go into the menu and click on the menu Item Alarms. Here you can add, edit, and remove Alarms. The following properties are available:

Property	Description
Condition	The condition can be a simple or a complex expression using any variable in the system to trigger an alarm. For example: PLC1.Temperature > 90 PLC1.Temperature > Local.TemperatureSetPoint PLC1.Temperature > (PLC1.Temperature + 10) PLC.1.DriveError = 1 These are executed server-side, therefore don’t use JavaScript syntax, but C# syntax.
Severity	The severity is a numeric value to sort the active alarms. Its purpose is to provide insight to the user or operator on which alarm to act first.
Asset	To assign an alarm to an asset group (see article assets)
AlarmGroups	You can assign an alarm to one or multiple alarm groups. Alarm groups are used for counting alarms, or as a filter for the alarm banner. The system will automatically generate a variable per group per severity, for example: SYSTEM.AlarmCount_Severity1_CIPStation
Message	The message is the message that will be shown in the alarm viewer (and stored in the database). It is possible to show a variable value in the message by using the placeholder {device.variable} or for example {PLC1.Temperature}.

Alarms can be viewed in the Alarm Viewer, see chapter Alarm Viewer.

There is a system variable SYSTEM.TotalAlarms that shows how many active alarms there currently are. In the future, we’ll be able to group alarms totals using assets (see article Assets).

⚠️

Alarms can trigger actions. EnvisionSCADA is NOT the tool to automate alarm mitigating actions. For example, if a motor is overheating, you could take action to stop the motor. This should be done in the controller, and not in EnvisionSCADA. You can use EnvisionSCADA to automate actions that are not important if they do not get executed.

Actions can be configured using the settings icon on the right of each alarm, see article Alarm / Event Actions.