Alert Summary vs Alarm Status Table Components

Ignition
1

A customer has a screen that has an Alert Summary Table on it, but I don’t see that component in the designer. The Ignition version is 7.9.9. I don’t find any documentation for the Alert Summary component either.

I’m guessing that the Alert Summary component was replaced at some point in time with the Alarm Status Table component as part of some major revision update. Is this assumption true?

Does documentation for the Alert Summary component still exist online?

Thanks.

2

Alerts were how we did alarms before alarms properly existed. Alarming was introduced in 7.6, so anything using alerts is quite old. I did a quick scan around, and couldn’t find any legacy docs on the alert table specifically. Did you have a particular question?

3

There was a request to set all the alarms to a Severity of “Severe”.
As you know, alarms don’t have a “Severity”, they have a “Priority”. So I’m uncertain how the Alert Summary component is getting the Severity it is showing on screen:

Alert_Summary_Table
Alert_Summary_Table904×173 58.5 KB

There is a dataset property called Alerts in the component.
That ds has a number of records but I’m not sure if that is automatically generated by the component based on alarms or other tag configuration. Editing the ds directly doesn’t seem to have any affect. It may need for the alarms to change state before updating the displayed values.

So in summary I guess what I’m trying to understand is how this component works with the alarms in this version, or does it even? I feel like I’m missing something here but don’t really know how to compose the question.

Thanks.

4

If I remember right (it’s been a while since I had to deal with anything in alerts) alerts should still be configured on tags, just in a somewhat different area than alarms are. I would start there.

5

This is one of the tags showing up in the Alert Summary:

Tag%20w%20alarm%20config
Tag%20w%20alarm%20config906×1074 179 KB

I don’t see any “Alert” configuration anywhere in the tag configuration.
This tag is the first tag in the “Alerts” dataset for the Alert Summary:
Alerts%20DS
Alerts%20DS1172×154 87.2 KB

One interesting thing to me at least is that this tag shows up 5 times in the dataset with two different severities/severity codes.
I am not familiar with tag Alert configuration since I have only worked in the 7.9.x and 8.0.0 versions.
Any insights would be helpful.

Thanks.

6

Hmm. If you export that tag as XML, do you get any alert information?

7

Nope, here is what the XML file contains:

<Tags>
   <Tag name="FeedPump1_Safety_Switch_Alm" path="" type="OPC">
      <Property name="Value">false</Property>
      <Property name="DataType">6</Property>
      <Property name="OPCServer">Ignition OPC-UA Server</Property>
      <Property name="OPCItemPath">ns=1;s=[VSEP]SYSAL.FeedPump1_Safety_Switch_Alm</Property>
      <Alarms>
         <Alarm name="VSEP - System Alarm">
            <Property name="mode">1</Property>
            <Property name="notes">Feed Pump is Dry </Property>
            <Property name="activePipeline">Notify</Property>
            <Property name="displayPath">VSEP</Property>
            <Property name="priority">4</Property>
         </Alarm>
      </Alarms>
   </Tag>
</Tags>

It has the alarm config but no Alert config.

8

Okay, so apparently I was mistaken from the get-go - alerts were automatically converted into alarms when you upgrade to 7.6+. I think that if changes made to alarms don’t show up on the alerts table, then we’re working off a locked-in-place configuration; so you’ll have to switch to the alarm status table to make any future changes.

9

That makes sense.

Thanks.