When are your sensor’s reading high measurements that you should be aware of?

How many times do your Industrial IoT devices need to detect something is out of range before sending you a message?

You’ll learn in this blog post how you can use your new Tools.Valarm.net outbound alerts feature to control how many times you’d like to see a sensor behavior before you and your teams are alerted via messaging and e-mail.

For example, if your sensor devices are measuring temperatures every minute and there is 1 reading that is a little high for your liking, e.g., 80 degrees F. You can configure an e-mail alert to send you, your teams, your clients, and anyone else a message about the current situation – a.k.a. situational awareness.

However, perhaps you are A-o.k. with a temperature over 80 degrees every once in a while. And what you really want to know is if the high temperature is sustained and stays above 80 degrees for 3 continuous alerts. As an example, this would mean 3 minutes of high temperatures if your sensor hubs are configured to upload 1 time per minute to Tools.Valarm.net .

Your new software feature on Valarm Tools Cloud allows you to set a threshold and only send an alert if your sensor maintains your custom conditions for X number of sensor uploads.

This’ll make even more sense with an example, so let’s get started on how to set up this new outbound alerts feature for your IoT sensor devices.

1st off, you’ll login to your Tools.Valarm.net account and go to your Device Manager. Click the name of the device you’d like to configure for outbound alerts.

On your IoT device details page, click Outbound Alerts under Configure Data Path, just like you see in the screenshot.

You’ll see your window where you can customize and configure your threshold responses for your outbound alerts.

Choose your IoT alert type and enable your alert. You can set up SMS / text message or e-mail alerts. You’ll see we’re using E-mail alerts in this example.

Give your alert a name, which will be used at the Subject line for e-mail alerts. In this example we’re alerting when there’s a high humidity, over 70% relative humidity, so we’re putting that as the name / subject line for the messages.

Choose the maximum number of alerts you’d like to send. You probably only need to send 1. In case you’re worried about an e-mail getting lost in the clouds you can send an additional alert here.

After your monitoring conditions clear up, e.g., temperature goes back below 80 degrees in the example described above, then you’ll receive an All Clear email messages. Perhaps you’ll stop checking your email for a few minutes. And when you do check your messages you’ll see there was an alert condition followed by an all clear message and everything has already solved itself.

Your rate throttle makes sure that the Valarm Tools Cloud system does not send out alerts more often than the limit you set here. Inbound IoT sensor data that would produce an alert, will instead be throttled by this setting. Note that All Clear messages aren’t ever throttled.

All of your sensor measurements are recorded in your Device Manager data log, they simply won’t generate outbound alerts if they happen more often than the throttle you set here. In this example we’ve set this option to 60 seconds / 1 minute. So if in under 60 seconds, the humidity goes above 70% for 3 consecutive alerts, then goes below 70%, then goes above 70% for 3 more consecutive alerts, we’ll only receive 1 message in that minute. This is sufficient for us to know that we need to look into the issue and perform industrial asset maintenance or any other organizational tasks.

You’ll probably want to make sure you receive an All Clear message with the checkbox. You’ll know when your measured sensor values go back outside your trigger thresholds and within the ranges you’re comfortable with.

Type your e-mail address and anyone else you’d like to be alerted when these sensor conditions are true.

Your Input Channel is what you’ll compare against to decide if an alert needs to be sent out.

Your Threshold Comparator is the operation you’d like to use to decide if an alert needs to be sent out. For example, less than or greater than X value.

Your Threshold Value is the value to use with your comparator and input channel. In our example you can see we’ve configured an alert to be sent out when relative humidity sensor measurements are greater than 70.

Next is the Minimum Sequential Tests value field. This is a key new feature that sets your threshold test for how many times in a row your comparator condition must be satisfied. For example, if you set this to 3, then the conditions need to happen 3 times in uninterrupted sequence in order to trigger the Outbound alert.

In our example that means 3 sensor consecutive humidity sensor measurements need to be above 70, e.g., 75, 72, 84, and then an outbound alert will be triggered. If you leave this field as 0, 1, or blank then this disables the minimum sequential tests needed and simply sends an alert when 1 single satisfied threshold boundary condition is met.

The Max Age field is used with the max sequential tests field. Your max age fields sets how old an alert can be in order to be counted as part of a sequential test. The age of the every alert tested must be LESS than this in order for it to count in the “Minimum Sequential Tests” as defined above.

For example and be warned: if you specify a Minimum Sequential Tests of ’10’ and your device is sending data exactly once per minute, but you set this value to 9 minutes and 59 seconds, the configuration will not trigger an Outbound Alert. In other words, this is the maximum age of the any, including the OLDEST, event that will be inspected for sequential testing.

Last is your Notes field where you can add notes about why you made this alert and what it does. In our example screenshot you see we’ve described that with this alert Tools.Valarm.net will send a message if the Industrial IoT humidity sensor measures and reports readings of greater than 70% relative humidity, 3 times in a row, in less than 10 minutes (600 seconds).

That’s it. You’ve done it.

Now you’ll receive alerts based on your configured conditions. In the screenshots you can see our IoT device we used for this example and the email alert messages that were sent when the sensor values went over 70, 3 times in a row, in less than 10 minutes. And when the sensor measurements go back down below 70, you’ll receive at all cleared messages that lets you know your alert has been cleared and your situation is back in the normal operating conditions you desire.

This completes your overview tutorial on how to get started with using the new outbound alerts features on Tools.Valarm.net. You can use these alerts with anything you’re monitoring with Tools.Valarm.net, whether you need water monitoring systems to measure water levels, water quality, air quality, or flood warning systems.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch at Info@Valarm.net if you’ve got any questions.