InTouch distributed alarm system

The Distributed Alarm system is made up of:

• An Alarm Manager, which manages currently active alarms (summary alarms) and historical alarms and events. The summary and historical alarms are held in the InTouch internal alarm memory.

• An Alarm DB Logger, which stores historical alarms and events to the alarm database. The alarm database is a SQL Server database.

• An Alarm Printer, which prints historical alarms and events.

• A set of ActiveX controls, which retrieve alarms and events from either the internal alarm memory or the alarm database at run time.

The following figure shows an overview of the system.

Important: The Distributed Alarm system runs as a set of Windows services. To reduce the security exposure of running the Distributed Alarm system with administrator privileges, the user account permissions have been set to non-interactive for these services.

Run time operators can use the Distributed Alarm system to:

• Show, log, and print alarms and events generated by a local InTouch application and by alarm systems of other networked applications.

• Acknowledge alarms locally or from a remote network node.

• Use the alarm ActiveX controls in your InTouch applications to show alarm displays that you pre-configure.

• Provide more feedback about the alarm using a separate alarm comment field.

As an application developer, you can:

• Control the alarms through dotfields.

• Configure your alarms so that they are enabled or disabled directly or indirectly under full control of the application. You can apply alarm suppression to single alarm classes, tags, or groups to prohibit the showing of alarm information on a specific view node. System-wide disablement can block alarm activity at the source.

• Configure alarm information to be logged to history. The Alarm DB Logger can run as a Windows service or be manually started on demand. Alarm logging uses UTC (GMT) time stamping and provides compatibility with DST and across time zones.

• Set up failover alarm providers. If a primary alarm provider fails, the Distributed Alarm system seamlessly acquires alarm information from the backup system. On reconnection of the primary node, the Distributed Alarm system ensures that alarm acknowledgements are re-synchronized prior to the returning primary system becoming live.

The Distributed Alarm system:

• Sends data through the SuiteLink protocol and uses a minimal amount of CPU and network resources.

• Time stamps the alarm at the time the alarm occurs, not when the consumer receives the alarm. The time stamp includes milliseconds.