After you set up your hardware and install iFIX, you can enable alarming and implement your alarm strategy.
To enable alarming and implement
your alarm strategy:
- Name your alarm areas in the Alarm Area database. If you want to share the database, move the file ALARMAREAS.AAD to your file server.
- Specify each computer's Alarm Areas path. If you are using a file server, enter the network path as the Alarm Areas path.
- Define the default (common) alarm and message format.
- Select the common alarm areas.
- Enable and configure the node's alarm services.
- Assign alarm areas to your operator and recipe messages. If you enable the SQL support in the SCU, assign alarm areas to SQL system task messages as well.
- On your SCADA servers, configure your database blocks by enabling alarming and event messaging, assigning alarm areas, selecting an alarm priority, and defining alarm limits.
- On your View clients, create pictures that display alarms in Data links, Alarm Summary objects, and by animating objects.
Improving Alarm Throughput
If you find that your system response time is not acceptable, because of the amount of alarms being processed, it is possible to configure the amount of work involved in processing a single alarm. The Alarm Summary alarm lists are updated for every alarm. These alarm lists include every possible Alarm Summary sorting type. For example, this includes: Priority, Acknowledge/Priority, TimeIn, TimeLast, Acknowledge/TimeLast, and so on.
If there are some alarm sorting types that are of no interest to you (no Alarm Summaries will be using them), it is possible to disable some alarm lists from being updated. This frees up system resources.
To do this, configure the Alarm.ini file in the iFIX Local path. If you installed iFIX to the default location, this path is: C:\Program Files (x86)\Proficy\iFIX\Local. In the [SUMMARY] section, use the DisableAckTLSort, DisableAckTimeSort, DisableAckPriSort, DisableTimeLastSort settings to disable these sorting types. The following is an excerpt from the Alarm.ini file which explains these settings.
[SUMMARY]
; DisableAckTLSort
; DisableAckTimeSort
; DisableAckPriSort
; DisableTimeLastSort
; When TRUE indicates that Almsum.exe does not have to update these lists
; since no Alarm Summary is using it as a sort and allows the Almsum.exe
; thread to be quicker. The list upkeep is default behavior otherwise.
; Default can be FALSE or no entry here.
DisableAckTLSort=FALSE
DisableAckTimeSort=FALSE
DisableAckPriSort=FALSE
DisableTimeLastSort=FALSE
