Alerts on Blocks

Scripting > Alerting on blocks

Alerts can be configured on blocks using genie python, there is no GUI for this at the moment. An alert will trigger when a block is outside of the specified lowlimit,highlimit range for the specified delay_out time, it is like run control but rather than putting the DAE into WAITING a message (via sms text and/or email) is sent. When the value comes back in range, it must be in range for delay_in seconds until an in-range alert is sent.

## set mobiles and emails to alert
g.alerts.set_sms(["123456789", "987654321"])
g.alerts.set_email(["a@b", "c@d"])

## set alert on block1 with default delay_in and delay_out (2 seconds)
## setting a range automatically enabled the alert
g.alerts.set_range("block1", -10.0, 20.0)
## set alert on block2 with specified delay_in and delay_out times
g.alerts.set_range("block2", -10.0, 20.0, delay_in=5.0, delay_out=5.0)

## alerts can be separately enabled and disabled
g.alerts.enable("block1", True)
g.alerts.enable("block2", False)

## print status of all configured alerts to screen
g.alerts.status()

## test
g.cset("block1", -50) # With above settings, a message would be sent to say the block has gone out of range
g.cset("block1", 0) # With above settings, a message would be sent to say the block has gone back in range

Alerts are saved across IBEX restarts, but the saving is not currently part of a configuration. The block related alert parameters will remain so long as the block exists (the email and sms parameters are always preserved), so you can change configuration and maintain an alert so long as the block continues to exists. If you change to a configuration where the block does not exist, then you lose those block specific alert settings.

Alerts, like run control, are normally set on floating point (or integer) value blocks. They can, however, be used on some "state" items that are symbolic names mapped to integers (enums). One example of this is the instrument state (SETUP=1,RUNNING=2,PAUSED=3,WAITING=4,VETOING=5) so if a block called RunState is attached to the process variable IN:myinst:DAE:RUNSTATE then

g.alerts.set_range("RunState", -1.0, 3.5, delay_in=5.0, delay_out=300.0)

will send an alert if the instrument has been WAITING or VETOING (>3.5) for more than 300 seconds.

Sending alerts from scripts

You can also send an immediate alert as part of a script by doing the following

## set mobiles and emails to alert, these aren't required if the email/phone numbers
## have already been set at some point on your instrument
g.alerts.set_sms(["123456789", "987654321"])
g.alerts.set_email(["a@b", "c@d"])

if bad_thing_happed:
    g.alerts.send("Help, a bad thing has happened!")

Future enhancements

• Create GUI for managing alerts, similar to how run control is done now
• Allow saving alerts into a configuration/component