Skip to main content

Anomaly Events

Support
  • Updated

In some circumstances, the machine may work not as well or expected, and this situation can be traced by the use of anomalies.

We can have different levels of anomalies: 

  • Major: the product is still working, but something wrong has happened that affects product health and could potentially cause a failure in the short term; a short term action is needed to avoid this risk.
  • Minor: the product is still working but something wrong has happened that could potentially affect product health in the long term; there is no risk of short term failure, therefore a programmable action is enough to deal with this case.

 An Anomaly is described by:

  • Name: the name of the anomaly (e.g. FAN_SLOWDOWN).

  • Title: the user-friendly name of the event (e.g. Fan running slow).

  • Description: the event description (e.g. The fan seems clogged or damaged).

  • Group: the name of the group to which this event belongs.
    The group can be used to filters and groups events into the DPS pages. 
  • Topics: the set of topics to which this event relates (e.g. CONNECTION, UPTIME, MAINTENANCE).
    Topics are predefined and can be used to filters and groups events into the DPS pages. 
  • Active/Clear Conditions: the metric/property-based conditions used to activate/deactivate the event instance.
    In case of property-based condition, you can use only properties of type DATE.
  • Troubleshooting: a set of remedies the user can follow to fix the problem by himself.

  • Options: a set of variables that can be used to let the user customize the thresholds for event triggering.

  • Alert: how to notify the event to the users.

 

Note that a MAJOR ANOMALY event, by default is associated to CRITICAL severity and ANOMALY category.
A MINOR ANOMALY event, by default is associated to WARNING severity and ANOMALY category. 

 

Creating an Anomaly

To add a new Anomaly event, you should:

  1. Enter the Events / Anomalies page.
  2. Select the Location or Thing Definitions tab, depending on where you want to create the event.
  3. In case of Thing Definition, select the Thing Definition to edit.
  4. Press the Add Event button.
  5. Provide the required information.
  6. Press the Save button and edit the additional information, if needed.

Editing an Anomaly Event

An Anomaly event is described by the following sections:

General

The main section describing the event through these properties:

  • Name: specifies the name of the event, it is a free value (e.g. TEMP WARNING).

  • Title: the user-friendly name of the event (e.g. High Temperature).

  • Description: the text describing the occurred anomaly.

  • Severity: WARNING or CRITICAL.

  • Category: fixed to ANOMALY

 

Within the event Title, and Description it is possible to use placeholders to include information about the thing, the event, and measures.

 

Dashboard

  • Details Template: the template used to display the event details in a dedicated dashboard.

Active and Clear Conditions

This section allows defining when the event must be activated or cleared.

For more details about how to define conditions refer to the Event Trigger Conditions article.

In case the event is not User Reported:

  • If the clear condition is not specified, the negated active condition is used.
  • To activate a new event, the activation timestamp of the clear condition must be prior to the activation timestamp of the active condition, and there are no events of the same type still active.
  • An event is periodically evaluated and is triggered only when the active condition changes from false to true and remains true for at least one evaluation interval (e.g. 60 seconds). This means that in case of metric-based conditions, metric values with a duration of less than one evaluation interval (e.g. 60 seconds) may not be detected in order to correctly trigger the event.

 

Technical Description and Remedies

Here you can describe more technically the event that has occurred and which are the causes and impacts. Optionally, you can provide a set of remedies, the user can follow to fix the problem by itself.

Remedies are presented to the user through the Thing Troubleshooting widget.

 

Options

This section allows defining options to be used within the event definition and whose value can be redefined by the end-user within the page by suing the thing-options widget.

For more details, see the Options article.

 

Alert

This section allows defining whether the Event must be notified to users through an Alert.

By clicking the Add Alert Button, you can create a new Alert for the event.

 

Event Refactoring

In case you have wrongly defined an anomaly that should instead be a failure, you can convert the event by clicking the Convert to Failure button present in the page bottom.

Related articles

Comments

0 comments

Please sign in to leave a comment.