IOTech Alarm Service

Unified and Standards-Based Alarm Management for the Edge

The IOTech Alarm Service delivers a robust, standards-based solution for normalizing and managing alarms across diverse edge systems. Built on the OPC UA Alarms and Conditions standard, it provides consistent and interoperable alarm handling — regardless of the source or underlying operational technology (OT).

Designed for flexibility and reliability, the service supports a broad range of alarm types and allows users to configure triggering conditions based on real-time threshold data. Whether sourced from physical devices or software systems, all alarms are modelled in a uniform and standards-compliant way.

Supported Alarm Sources 

Alarm threshold data can originate from various sources, including:

• Industrial devices, such as a temperature value read from a Modbus device register

• Native device alarms, like a BACnet device generating its own alarm

• Application subsystems, e.g., rules engines or analytics components that define alarm thresholds

• Offline device alarms, such as a monitoring device that becomes unreachable 

Alarm Event Generation & Routing

The Alarm Service subscribes to alarm threshold data published over the MQTT message bus and evaluates this data using configurable, standards-based alarm types (e.g., level, deviation, rate of change, etc). When conditions are met, the service generates structured alarm events.

It also supports alarm routing, enabling delivery of alarm notifications to one or more user-defined endpoints — such as email or messaging platforms — based on customizable criteria like alarm severity.

Key Capabilities

• Fully aligned with OPC UA Alarms & Conditions standard, Release 1.05.03, 2023-12-31

• Designed in accordance with IEC 62682 and ISA 18.2 alarm management standards

• Seamlessly integrates with IOTech Edge Central, Edge Connect, and EdgeX Foundry

• Event-driven architecture supports high-performance alarm delivery without the need for polling

• Normalizes alarms across heterogeneous OT environments

• Model and configure alarms based on standard OPC UA alarm types:
  
  • Level Alarm
  • Deviation Alarm
  • Rate of Change Alarm
  • Discrete Alarm 

• Easily associate alarms conditions with alarm threshold data sources

• Persists alarm state and routing metadata in the local PostgreSQL database

• Routes alarm event data to configurable endpoints (e.g., Email, Telegram, MQTT)

• Provides a comprehensive REST API for:
  
  • Alarm management (e.g., subscribe, acknowledge, confirm, enable, suppress, shelve)
  • Alarm configuration and routing control (create, retrieve, update,  delete)

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