PI Notifications Overview
PI Notifications is the new alarming and notification platform for the PI System. This architecture is built to be highly available, simple to configure and enterprise aware. These aspects of the product are delivered in several ways.
- Highly Available Scheduling: Highly available services have been a core tenet of OSIsoft since PR1 introduced a highly available PI Server. PI Notifications ships with a highly available service that ensures redundancy in determining when notification conditions are met. The advantages of redundancy are twofold. First, users can ensure message delivery when they incur a software/hardware problem on the scheduling machine. Also, when users may schedule system maintenance without worrying that important messages are missed because of system downtimes.
- Simple Configuration: While providing a feature rich notification platform, PI Notification also provides a user interface in which users may easily configure notifications for their production data. Furthermore, because PI Notifications are built on PI AF, users can build one notification for a type of asset (template) and then reapply this notification to many assets of the same type.
- Enterprise Ready: PI Notifications in enterprise ready in several ways. First, because notifications are stored in AF, they can be shared amongst many users . Users will therefore work in a naturally collaborative environment where they are not required to manage their notifications locally, allowing for corporate-wide reuse of notification logic. Second, PI Notifications will automatically integrate with your Active Directory (AD) rollouts so that users can assign AD Contacts directly to the notification delivery, without reconfiguring this recipient information. Finally, PI Notifications can be used to deliver messages to systems as well as users. For example, PI Notifications could be used to create work orders on maintenance systems when certain conditions occur.
The platform which delivers this feature set could be broken down into several categories.
PI Analytics Scheduler/PI Analytics Processor: This highly available server side component schedules when the notification rules are to be evaluated (Scheduler) and then does the calculation itself (Processor). Redundancy here ensures that neither scheduled nor unscheduled downtime causes notification calculations or delivery to be skipped.
Configuration: Notifications are stored on PI AF 2.x, a SQL based meta-database. Notification configuration can include the following portions
- Notification Logic (required): Notification logic governs the circumstances under which a notification is sent to a user. This logic may be a simple comparison against a threshold, an SQC type evaluation, a Performance Equation, or any combination thereof.
- Subscription (optional): Subscription describes how messages are delivered to the appropriate user or system. If no subscription is provided than the notification is stored on the PI Server but no messages are sent. Delivery channels are the means by which subscriptions are delivered. PI Notifications ships with Email and webservice delivery channels. Subscriptions support escalation teams, so that if message recipients are unavailable, the message may get sent to someone else.
- Content (optional): Content describes any additional information users will receive in their message about the asset/problem at hand. Additional content could include ProcessBook pages, web links, or any other documents.
User Interface: Users may configure PI Notifications via the PI System Explorer, an application which ships with PI AF. Within this application, users will be able to create notification logic, and apply it to one or more production assets.
PI Datalink and PI ProcessBook Components: Both PI Datalink and PI Processbook will ship with components that will allow users to integrate the platform with those respective visualization tools.