Your remote monitoring needs are important for you, your teams, and your organization.
How quickly will you know if your Industrial IoT sensors are reporting values outside of what you need? Here are a few example monitoring scenarios requiring the real-time alerts you’ll learn about in this blog post:
Flood Warning Systems measuring high water level reports?
- Did the temperature go too high in any of your vehicles?
- Humidity dropped below your custom threshold?
- Air quality at dangerously concerning levels?
- Water flowmeter alerts when your organization is pumping too much water for your current water well levels?
- Vacuums or Pumps go out of whack on 1 of your fleet vehicles, trucks, or trailers loaded with Industrial Equipment and Sensors?
- Noise, sound, and decibel levels too high?
- Need alerts when something’s happening with your organization’s remote assets?
You can get Text Message (a.k.a., SMS, a.k.a, Short Message Service) alerts for any Industrial IoT sensors you’re monitoring with Tools.Valarm.net.
We’ve integrated Twilio with Tools.Valarm.net so your outbound sensor telemetry alerts can go to mobile devices like phones via text messages / SMS! You can also send alerts via e-mail when your remotely monitored assets do something you don’t want to do. See this page for more info on setting up email alerts for Industrial IoT. We’ll be talking about how to set up SMS text message alerts for your Industrial IoT applications in this article.
First off, log in to your Valarm Tools Cloud account at Tools.Valarm.net.
Then we’ll set up your account info and link your Twilio account to Valarm Tools Cloud. Click your account name that’s in the blue button in the top right part of the page. This blue account name button is highlighted with a red circle in the screenshot here.
Next click the view button for your currently selected Tools.Valarm.net account. You’ll see the view button highlighted with a red ellipse in the bottom left part of the page in the screenshot. Yours will look similar to this. Click view and we’re on to the next step!
Now we’re on your Account View page and you can see that the Twilio Connect Integration is not enabled, yet. Let’s fix that up and enable Twilio + Valarm Tools Cloud integration so you can send out your IIoT sensor alerts via SMS text message!
Click the Edit button in the bottom left of the Account View page. It’s highlighted with a red circle in the screenshot. After you click that we’ll authorize and link your Twilio account to Tools.Valarm.net.
We’re ready to link and authorize Valarm Tools Cloud on Twilio.com! You can click the question mark (?) to learn more about this or any other Valarm feature. You’re seeing an example of this in the screenshot.
Click the link next to Twilio Connect Integration. Then you can authorize and link Twilio and Valarm.
After that we’ll set up the phone number you want to use for sending out your sensor text message SMS alerts.
When you click the link to integrate Twilio + Valarm Tools Cloud, you’ll be taken to the twilio.com authentication page. It’ll look like what you see in these screenshots.
You can log in to your existing Twilio account. Or you can set up a new Twilio account if you don’t have one yet.
After you’ve logged in and authorized your Twilio account from the previous step, then you’ll see a new, blue button appear that lets you choose your Twilio phone number.
Now that yourValarm Tools Cloud + Twilio authentication is complete, click the button to launch the window for assigning a Twilio phone number.
You can see this in the example screenshot where we’ve entered the area code 801 and there’s a list of available phone numbers.
Choose the phone number you want using the button next to your favorite number. This is the phone number from which you and your teams will receive your Valarm Industrial IoT sensor alerts!
After you pick a Twilio phone number you’ll get a confirmation message.
You can also log in to your Twilio dashboard and check what phone number(s) you’ve got.
There’s an example of the Twilio dashboard in the screenshot here. In the screenshot you can see that the phone number we got on Tools.Valarm.net is configured and managed by Valarm Tools Cloud. Excellent!
We’re ready to set up what Valarm sensor devices send SMS text message alerts. And for what thresholds you need text alerts!
Let’s go to your Device Manager page on Tools.Valarm.net to configure when, where, and who will get your SMS text message alerts.
On the Device Manager page, click your Valarm sensor hub device with the sensors you need to set up for SMS Text Message Alerts.
Click Outbound Alerts under Configure Data Path, after you’ve clicked the name of the Valarm device you want to set up.
You’ll see Outbound Alerts after you mouse over the Configure Data Path orange button, in the upper right part of the page. It’s highlighted with a red circle in the screenshot here.
You’re ready to Configure Threshold Responses for outbound IIoT sensor alerts!
Under the Configure Threshold Responses window you’ll see numbered, clickable tabs where you can set up your different channels / alerts for a Valarm device.
In the screenshot here we’ve configured channel 3 to send SMS via Twilio alerts.
Fill out the fields appropriately for your organization’s remote sensor monitoring application. Give your SMS text message alert a name, e.g., water levels, flood warning systems, or high temperature or low humidity.
Choose how many SMS text message alerts you want to send, e.g., send 3 text messages in order to be sure that the person on the other end is paying attention and getting alerted!
You can set an alert throttle for how often you’d like to send SMS text message alerts. For example, when the temperature is too high but you only want to send a text message every 60 seconds to be less spammy then you can set the alert rate throttle to 60 seconds.
Check the box for Send All Clear Message if you want an all clear SMS text message alert to be sent out after your sensor conditions have gone back into a safe threshold that you and your teams are ok with.
Under destination put in the phone number or numbers of the folks you need to automatically notify via text message when this alert threshold happens.
Pick your sensor you’re using for your alert under Input channel, e.g., temperature, humidity, water levels, air quality.
Select your threshold comparator like greater than to set when your alerts will be sent out.
Then set your threshold value. In the example you see in the screenshot we’ve set up SMS text message alerts to be sent out when humidity > 70.
Last add notes that will be sent in the text message so that the receiver knows exactly what’s going on with your organization’s remote assets.
That’s everything! Once you save your outbound SMS text message alerts then Valarm Tools Cloud will automatically send out text alerts when your threshold is hit.
You’ll see some photos here of sample text messages I sent to other Valarmy team members using the configuration above. Once I breathed heavily on a Meteo weather sensor connected to a 3G GSM sensor hub, my bad breath / highly humid CO2 triggered text messages to Pawel and Lorenzo!
Note: You can also get e-mail alerts if that’s better for your organization and your teams. Have a look at this page for step by step How To instructions on setting up email alerts with Valarm Tools Cloud.
Whether you’re working with sensors made by Flowline, Alphasense, Campbell Scientific, Geokon, Eno Scientific, McCrometer, Doran, or any other hardware manufacturer, Tools.Valarm.net gives you effective alerting and early warning systems.
If you need your remote monitoring information on a web dashboard then have a look at our real-time dashboard webpages our customers use for their Industrial IoT and sensor telemetry deployments.
See our Customer Stories page for stories on how our clients use Valarm IIoT solutions across all industries, like natural resources, governments, agriculture, water usage, air quality, mining, oil and gas.
Questions?
Please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@valarm.net if you have any questions! Or you can give us a call at 1 (424) 442-0963.
