An alarm only matters if it reaches the right person fast enough to act. A screen full of red that nobody's watching at 2 a.m. isn't alarming — it's decoration. Ignition has a complete alarm pipeline built in, plus clean paths to phone, text and voice. Here's how we set it up so a real problem gets a real human, and noise doesn't bury the signal.
Start at the tag: definitions and priorities
Alarms in Ignition are configured on the tags themselves — setpoints, conditions, deadbands and a priority (Diagnostic, Low, Medium, High, Critical). Defining them on UDTs means every instance of a pump or tank alarms identically. Getting priorities honest is half the battle: if everything is Critical, nothing is. Reserve the top tiers for "wake someone up" conditions and let the rest live on the alarm screen.
Notification pipelines
Ignition routes alarms through notification pipelines — a visual flow that decides who gets told, how, and what happens if they don't respond. A pipeline can branch by priority, area or time of day, send a notification, wait for acknowledgment, and escalate if it isn't acked. This is where on-call logic lives.
Email, SMS and voice
Email is built in (point Ignition at an SMTP server). SMS and voice come via the Twilio module or a third-party service, so a Critical alarm can text or call the on-call tech, not just email them. For utilities and unmanned sites, a phone call that escalates until someone answers is often the requirement — and that's exactly what pipelines + Twilio (or WIN911) deliver.
WIN911 and on-call rosters
Many districts standardize on WIN911 for telephonic alarm callout — rosters, on-call schedules, escalation trees and acknowledgment over phone. Ignition integrates with it cleanly, so the SCADA system raises the alarm and WIN911 runs the human side: call the primary, wait, escalate to the backup, log the ack. If you're not on WIN911, Ignition's own pipelines plus rosters and on-call schedules cover most of the same ground natively.
Mobile push
With Perspective, alarms can push to the mobile app, so the on-call person gets a notification and can open the live screen to assess before driving in. Pair push for awareness with SMS/voice for the must-act criticals.
Avoiding alarm flood
The fastest way to make alarming useless is too many alarms. Tactics that keep it healthy: sensible deadbands and on-delays so a flapping value doesn't fire repeatedly; alarm shelving so a known issue can be silenced for a set time with a note; grouping so a single upstream fault doesn't trigger fifty downstream alarms; and periodic alarm rationalization to retire alarms nobody acts on. A quiet alarm system that fires rarely and meaningfully is the goal.
Where we come in
We design Ignition alarming end to end — definitions, priorities, pipelines, escalation, WIN911 or Twilio, mobile push, and rationalization — for plants and utilities across California's Central Valley and remotely nationwide. To get alarms that reach the right person and nothing more, get in touch or see our Ignition development services. It pairs naturally with remote monitoring of distributed sites.