Signatures for Alarms and Events

The InTouch Distributed Alarm system includes the Alarm DB Logger utility that logs alarms and events to the alarm database. Alarm and event records are generated by the system and the signature is linked to a specific event. When an entire alarm or event row is retrieved, the signature is linked.

InTouch-generated event records include the operator and a comment which is the Alarm Comment field of the InTouch tag. InTouch verification events can be handled with scripts that utilize the InvisibleVerifyCredentials() function.

All IDE user-defined attributes generate events. The generated event records include the operator and a comment. The operator column can be forced by setting an Attribute to either Operate, Secured Write or Verified Write access. The comment column is the object description, all Attributes in an object will have the same comment therefore each event should be its own object. Boolean events can take advantage of the Boolean label extension for the Attribute, which will be logged in the Value String column of the event database. Verified Write events will show both the done by and checked by operator in the OperatorName column.

When an InTouch alarm provider, for example, InTouch or the IDE, is configured to use either operating system or IDE-managed authentication and an alarm occurs, the alarm record contains the full name of the operator in the Operator Full Name column, assuming the operator is logged on along with the time and date and event details. For example if a user is registered in the PLANT_FLOOR domain with a user ID of JohnS and a full name of John Smith, the Operator Full Name column contains John Smith. If the alarm is subsequently acknowledged, and the node performing the acknowledgement is set to use operating system or IDE security, the alarm record contains the full name of the acknowledgement operator. Otherwise, the alarm record contains a computer name concatenated with whatever is in the $Operator tag.

Applications deployed in an FDA-regulated environment should use OS security. InTouch Managed applications should use IDE security and the IDE should use OS group or OS user security.

For information about alarms and events and logging see the Alarms and Events topics in the InTouch HMI online help and "Working with Alarms and Events" in the AVEVA Application Server online help.