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The Vision visualization system has a few components that allow you to view alarming information within the client. The Alarm Status Table allows you to view the current alarms in the system, providing an easy way to inspect the alarm details, shelve the alarm, and acknowledge it. The Alarm Journal Table allows you to view a history of alarms by reading from an Alarm Journal's database tables. Note, that a valid database connection and an Alarm Journal Profile are required to use the Alarm Journal Table.
The Alarm Status Table is a built-in component in Ignition that displays the current status of all alarms in the system into one view. Each alarm is color coded so you can quickly identify the state of the alarm. The Alarm Status Table is highly customizable and can be configured to show active, unacknowledged, cleared, and acknowledged alarms. Once alarms have been configured, most users will want to view the status of alarms from within a client. Alarm acknowledged and shelving are built directly into the Alarm Status Table making it easy for operators to respond quickly to alarms.
Alarms can be visualized in several ways. By far the most popular way to visualize alarm status is with the Alarm Status Table component. This component immediately displays the status of all alarms in the system from all Tag providers. In addition, the Alarm Status Table has an extensive list of filtering options where you can filter down to specific alarm criteria. For example, the component can filter by source path which means a single Tag provider, folder in a Tag path, or even UDT instances can be focused on by the component.
The Alarm Status Table component can be configured to view alarms, and monitor and respond to alarms, but there are a host of properties for this component to become familiar with. The Alarm Status Table properties are configured in the Designer. When configuring the Alarm Status Table, you will have to toggle between both the Designer and Preview Modes in order to configure the Alarm Status Table properties and organize the alarm data in the table.
Alarms
Alarms must be set up on Tags for them to show up in the Alarm Status Table.
When you drag the Alarm Status Table component to your Designer, there are some default properties already configured. Some of the defaults may work for your client users, but you always have the option to change them. For example, the table shows all the "Active and Unacknowledged", "Active and Acknowledged", and "Cleared and Unacknowledged" alarms. It also displays the time the alarm went Active as well as the current State and Priority of the alarm, but you may want to narrow the scope of your alarm state entries and only display Active and Unacknowledged alarms with a priority of Medium and higher. You can update these property settings in the Property Editor of the Designer under the Filters group.
The Property Editor has a dedicated Filtering group where you can configure filtering properties for displaying alarm data in your Alarm Status Table: alarm state, priority, source path, display path, and Tag provider. Once you configure your properties, the alarm table will refresh with new alarm data based on your filter property settings. When displaying alarms on the Alarm Status Table component, it is common to filter on either the 'Display Path' or the 'Source Path.'
The Display Path can be customized on each alarm. The default value for an alarm's Display Path is a Tag path that leads to the name of the alarm. The Integer Tag example below has an alarm named 'Alarm', and is located on a Tag path of 'Alarming Example/Integer Tag', thus the Display path will resolve to 'Alarming Example/Integer Tag/Alarm'. However, the Display Path can be customized when configuring the alarm. This is generally utilized to display readable messages as to what the issue is: i.e., "Tank 105 High Temp Alarm".
The Source Path is also a path to the alarm, but also notes the Tag provider the alarm is located in. Again using the Tag below, if the name of the Tag provider is 'default', then the source path would resolve to 'prov:default:/Tag:Alarming example/Integer Tag:/alm:Alarm'. Unlike the Display Path, the Source Path on an alarm can never be overridden.
Understanding the functionality of Display Paths and Source Paths allows for much flexibility when filtering alarms by Tag path.
In Preview Mode and the Vision Client, you can customize how you want to see the alarm data. You can right click in the header to hide or show columns, and move columns by clicking them and dragging them around to organzied the alarm data. You can also sort by column by simply left clicking, or sort by multiple columns by holding the Ctrl key while clicking the column headers. You will see small numbers next to the column header to indicate the sort order and direction (ascending vs descending). Client users can customize the alarm data in the Alarm Status Table to however they wish to view the data.
There is a pre-built component in Ignition called the Alarm Journal Table that allows the database to see alarm history. It provides a built-in view to explore alarm history that has been stored in your database. Before viewing alarm history, you must first tell Ignition to log alarms in your database by creating your Alarm Journal Profile. By default, the Alarm Journal Table does not filter out any of the alarms, it simply shows you all the alarms stored in the table for the time range set. When you add an Alarm Journal component to a window and have no start and end dates selected, it defaults to show the previous 8 hours of alarms and will not refresh itself until the start or end date properties change. You can use the Start Date and End Date properties to filter on alarms, or you can use the Date Range component to filter alarms during a specific time period.
Refreshing Alarm Journal Table Data
Alarm data in the journal does not refresh automatically. Toggle one of the filters in the Property Editor, or on the Calendar component you are using. You can also choose to make the journal table data refresh automatically by setting an expression binding on the journal's End Date property to now().
The alarms are color coded so you know what each of the states represent. In Preview Mode, you can right click in the header to hide or show columns, and move columns by clicking them and dragging them around. You can sort by column by simply left clicking, or sort by multiple columns by holding the Ctrl key while clicking the column headers. You will see small numbers next to the column header to indicate the sort order and direction (ascending vs descending).
To view an alarm's Details and Notes, select an individual alarm, then click the Search
icon in the lower right corner of the table to see all the information that is associated with the individual alarm.
To close the Details and Notes tabs, click the Search icon again or click the Expand 
icon.
