Alarm counters provide a way for you to determine the general alarm state of a single SCADA server, or areas within that server. They indicate how many tags on a node are in alarm, how many of these alarms are CRITICAL, HIHI, HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW, LOLO, and INFO priority, and how many are acknowledged or unacknowledged.
Alarm counters do not span nodes. However, if you want to get a view of your entire system, you can use VBA scripts or mathematical expressions to combine alarm counter information from two or more nodes. You can access alarm counters locally or remotely.
You can also use alarm counters to animate and color process graphics to alert you to an alarm. For example, you can configure an object to display a certain foreground color when there are unacknowledged alarms in a specific alarm area.
Alarm counters allow you to:
- Display an accurate count of acknowledged (but outstanding) and unacknowledged alarms in the WorkSpace.
- Use digital or analog blocks as triggers for alarm handling conditions within a process database.
- Attribute animations to objects based upon alarm conditions.
- Display values that determine whether or not acknowledged and unacknowledged alarms exist in your system.
Features
The following list summarizes the alarm counters features:
- All alarm counters in FIX32 are available in iFIX, allowing FIX32 nodes to retrieve alarm counter information from iFIX nodes over the network.
- All alarm counters contain numeric fields which allow you to display counter information in numeric format and perform mathematical operations such as displaying alarm counter information for Area C + Area D.
- All alarm counters available for standard (A-P) areas are available for custom (non A-P) alarm areas. This information is available through a Tag. Field interface.
- An ALARMCOUNTERS tag to access node alarm counters.
- Alarm counters to indicate blocks with alarming disabled.
- Alarm counters to provide a running total of alarms for a node or an area since system startup.
- An Alarm Counters tab in the Expression Builder to browse alarm areas.
