Any alarm in Ignition can use an existing alarm notification pipeline on the local Gateway and/or remote Gateway. Alarms can share pipelines resulting in a single pipeline providing notification services to many alarms. When an alarm becomes active, cleared, or acknowledged it can execute a designated alarm pipeline. The information about the alarm is ported automatically into the alarm pipeline.
Each alarm has 3 events that can push it into a pipeline: Active, Clear, and Acknowledge (Ack). While they all work the same way, it is helpful to know a few things about each event. For all pipelines, the default settings are to drop alarms from the pipeline if that alarm is Acknowledged, Cleared, or Shelved. This means each Alarm Pipeline Event requires slight changes to these properties, so it is a good idea to have special "cleared" or "shelved" versions of any pipelines that will be called from these other events.
The Active Pipeline event is the most commonly used event for sending alarm notification. This happens when the alarm goes into the active state (alarm has happened). The default settings are commonly OK because any Acknowledged, Cleared, or Shelved alarms are usually not considered active anymore.
The Clear Pipeline event is the most commonly used event for sending notification that the issue is no longer active, but may still need attention. This happens when the alarm goes from the active state to the cleared state. The default setting to drop out if "Cleared" is NOT OK because any alarm event that started as a "Clear" event will always drop out at the Start Block.
The Acknowledge (Ack) Pipeline event is the most commonly used event for telling your users that someone is working on the problem. This happens when the alarm goes into the acknowledged state (usually an operator pressing the Acknowledge button). The default setting to drop out if "Acknowledged" is NOT OK because any alarm event that started as an "Acknowledged" event will always drop out at the Start Block. It is usually a good idea to also set the "Cleared" dropout condition to False since any acknowledge notification is probably wanted regardless of if the alarm is cleared.