To configure a condition, use the Axeda® Configuration application - Asset Condition wizard. This topic is intended to help administrators plan the conditions required for their business applications.
When defining conditions, keep the following in mind:
1. Name - Each condition must have a unique name. You can use up to 100 alphanumeric characters in a condition name.
2. Severity - You can select a severity only once, so plan your conditions before starting. The severities available to you are 2 through 10; 1 is reserved for the default condition, "Good." Use "2" for your least severe condition and "10" for your most severe condition.
3. Image - Ten colors are available to you; consider using each color only once to avoid confusion for the users of the Axeda® Service and Configuration applications. Green is the color used for the default condition, "Good."
4. Triggers can be one or more of the following:
§ "Missing asset" events - the Axeda® Platform cannot contact the asset. This trigger fires in the following situations:
a. An asset running an Axeda Agent (Gateway, Connector, IDM, or Agent Embedded) fails to contact the Platform as configured for the model (Missing Assets page of the Model wizard).
b. The connection between an Axeda® Gateway and a managed asset is down.
c. An M2M asset that is configured to poll on a regular basis fails to contact the Platform as configured for the model.
d. For shoulder tap-enabled M2M assets that have a poll rate of NULL, the ping rate stored in the Platform is 0. A ping rate of 0 generally means that the asset never goes missing. Therefore, for these assets, the MissingDevice task sets the asset to Missing if the Platform has performed the configured number of retries for a shoulder tap message and the asset still has not responded. For information on Shoulder Tap messaging, refer to Shoulder Tap Messaging definition.
§ If the Platform is running in "redundant-gateways" mode, two additional events are available: Platform partially connected to redundant Gateways (" Enterprise Server to Agent connection compromised"); Asset partially connected to redundant Gateway ("Gateway to asset connection compromised"). These events indicate that at least one managing Gateway for an asset is disconnected and at least one managing Gateway is still connected.
§ Alarms that match criteria specified as part of the condition
§ Data expressions that you define as part of the condition
Note: Although
triggers are the recommended way to use conditions, triggers are not required.
If you want to use actions to set and unset conditions instead of triggers,
do NOT select a trigger. Select only the severity and an image.
On the other hand, to avoid any confusion, do NOT use actions to set or
unset asset conditions for which you have configured triggers.
5. The Platform always sets a condition when any of the triggers defined for the condition are true. However, the Platform does not always display a condition as soon as it is set. Whether or not the condition is displayed immediately depends on its severity. The condition with the highest severity is always displayed.
6. Once
a condition is set, how is it unset? The Platform automatically unsets
a condition when all of the associated
triggers (events) are false. For example, if all alarms are acknowledged
and data expressions evaluate to false, the Platform can unset the condition.
If even one event, alarm, or data expression is still true, the Platform
cannot unset the condition.
After unsetting the condition, the Platform checks whether any other conditions
are currently assigned to the asset. If so, the Platform checks the severity
levels of these conditions and then sets the condition with the highest
severity level as the Status
of the asset.
Note: If the triggers provided here do not suffice, you can use the more advanced method of configuring conditions. Refer to Advanced Method of Configuring Conditions.
For example, suppose you associate AnalogAlarmA (and its range of values) with the condition "Overheated." You assign the condition a severity of 8 and an orange (ball) icon. When the alarm occurs, the Platform takes the following actions automatically:
1. The Platform checks whether any other conditions have been set for the asset. If not, then the Platform sets this condition for the asset. Continuing the example, the Status field on the Asset dashboard shows the condition, "Overheated." The orange icon appears in the Status column for the asset on pages of the Axeda® Service and Configuration applications.
2. If other conditions have been set, the Platform checks the severity of these conditions. Two results are possible:
§ If the severity of the new condition is lower than at least one other condition currently set, the Platform writes the condition for the asset to the Platform but does not make it the condition that is visible in all Status fields for the asset. If you click the Status field in the Asset dashboard, you can see this new condition.
§ If the severity of the new condition is higher than any other condition currently set, it sets the new condition as the status of the asset. Using the example again, the severity of "Overheated" is 8. If no other currently set condition has a severity of 9 or 10, then the Platform sets the "Overheated" condition as the status of the asset. The other conditions are not unset and they can still be seen in the popup window that appears when you click the Status field in the Asset dashboard.
Whenever any event associated with a condition occurs, the Asset dashboard always displays the condition that has the highest severity. Each time that a condition is unset, the condition that has the next highest severity is displayed. For example, consider the following condition configuration, in order of severity (10 has the highest severity):
Condition red, severity 10, is mapped to the events Missing, Alarm2, Alarm4, and DataExpression1.
Condition orange, severity 9, is mapped to Alarm1, Alarm3, and DataExpression2.
Condition blue, severity 5, is mapped to DataExpression3
Condition yellow, severity 2, is mapped to DataExpression4.
If all the events mapped to conditions occur, then the Platform displays the red condition first (it has the highest severity). When all the events associated with condition red become false (the asset is online, the alarms are acknowledged and DataExpression1 evaluates to false, for example), then the Platform displays the condition orange. Similarly, when all the events associated with condition orange become false, the Platform displays the condition blue. When the DataExpression3 becomes false, the Platform displays condition yellow.
Note: As shown in this example, all the events for a condition must clear before the condition is cleared.