Configure SCADA Alarm Notification
SCADA alarm notification is essential in almost any SCADA system implemented, especially in industrial production lines. User shall be alerted at the first moment when an alarm is activated, to avoid any loss.
For Ecava IGX, SCADA alarm notification system can be configured under ‘Output’. It can be triggered by a timer or an alarm event. The available output types are email, file, printer and SMS (short message service).
Let’s choose email as our output type in this training, you will learn to configure an output to allow it to send alarm notifications through email.
Configure Output
First, open Ecava IGX SCADA and create a new project. On the left menu, select the ‘Output’ item to open the configuration table. Notice the ‘Email’ in the existing configuration. We will modify the existing settings.
Open the email settings by clicking the ‘Email’ item below the ‘Output’ item on the left menu. The default settings will show up. Note that the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server is used to relay the email to its recipient. The example uses the Yahoo SMTP server, which is smtp.mail.yahoo.com. The Google SMTP server is smtp.gmail.com. If ‘Use SSL’ (Secure Socket Layer) is set to True, the port number used by the SMTP server is usually 465 or 587. The login name and password are used to login your email account. You must fill in the SMTP server, port number, use SSL, login name, password and specify at least one recipient email address. The display name and subject (email title) are optional. For simplicity, we shall leave other settings as default. Save your settings after making changes.
Configure Output Format
Open the output format table by clicking the ‘Output Format’ item on the left menu. The row with the name ‘Email_format’ refers to email formatting. Its corresponding ‘Output To’ entry is Email. This means it is using the email settings that we previously set. If you click any entry in the ‘Output To’ column, a drop down list of the output items will show up. In this training, we shall keep the default settings.
Configure Alarm
Create a new alarm group called ‘Test_Alarm’. (Refer to previous SCADA alarm training if you missed out how) Click the column entry that corresponds to the ‘Output Format’ column and select ‘Email_format’ from the drop down list. Save the setting.
Open the Test_Alarm configuration table. Add a new alarm called test_alarm. Set the message to be “The test alarm is triggered.”. We shall use an existing virtual tag to trigger the alarm. Specify the tag name as ‘tag’ and set the alarm to be triggered by ‘Compare Value’. The condition is ‘Tag > L1’ and the limit 1 is 10. This means the alarm will be triggered when tag is greater than 10.
Test and run the project
After all the changes in Project Editor have been saved, run the project and IGX Server will be launched. Open the Watch window and set the value of ‘tag’ to 11. This will trigger the test_alarm. On the Task window, select the ‘Output’ item and notice the status messages that show up on the right side. If the email settings are correct, the status message shall indicate that the email has been sent successfully (as shown in screenshot below), and the recipient will receive the email.
Check the mailbox of the recipient email, and the alarm message received shall have a content similarly as follows.
Download Ecava IGX today and start configure your own SCADA alarm notification system, it comes along free even with the lite package.