Alarm System
Many plants have an intrusion alarm panel in the transfer station and a communication cabinet whose supply is supervised by its own contacts. Where those contacts are wired to a controller Mirox can read, the platform turns them into live signals, a history you can scroll back through, and park events that reach you the same way every other event does.
Concept
Nothing on this page is measured. Every value is the position of a relay contact read through a controller's digital inputs: the alarm panel closes one contact when the gate or door is open, one when it has raised an alarm and one when it is in fault, and the same controller reads the communication cabinet's own supervision contacts.
Each signal is normalized so that 1 always means "the condition is present" — door open, alarm raised, UPS on battery, breaker tripped — and 0 means normal, whichever way the contact happens to be wired. And no reading is never a 0: a signal the controller did not serve is shown as a gap, not as "everything is fine".
One component per alarm system
An alarm system is a single flat component in the plant — not a hierarchy. All seven signals belong to it, and everything on this page is grouped by it, so a site with two panels shows two sets of tiles.
What the Page Shows
The Alarm system page appears in a plant's left-hand navigation as soon as the plant is marked as having one. It has five parts:
- Intrusion — three live tiles for the alarm panel itself: gate / door open, alarm raised, fault. Each tile shows the current state, how long it has been in that state, and how old the newest reading is.
- Communication cabinet — four live tiles for the cabinet's supervision contacts: UPS alarm, UPS on battery, heating breaker tripped, main switch off.
- State timeline — one 0/1 strip per signal over the last 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days, so you can see exactly when a gate was opened or how long the cabinet ran on battery. Periods with no reading are drawn as gaps rather than as normal.
- Events — the alarm events of the plant, open ones first, with the same detail view every other park event has.
- Components — the alarm systems themselves: name, the logger they are read through, last reading, online state, and any linked ticket. You can rename a system, hide it, mark it as checked, and leave a note.
If the plant is not marked as having an alarm system, the page explains that instead of showing empty tiles.
The Seven Signals
| Signal | Group | What it means | Raises an event | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gate / door open | Intrusion | The panel reports the gate or door as open | No — recorded as a signal only | – |
| Alarm raised | Intrusion | The panel has raised an alarm | Yes | Critical |
| Fault | Intrusion | The panel reports a fault of its own | Yes | High |
| UPS alarm | Cabinet | The cabinet's UPS reports a fault | Yes | High |
| UPS on battery | Cabinet | Mains supply lost — the UPS is carrying the cabinet | Yes | Normal |
| Heating breaker tripped | Cabinet | The cabinet heating's circuit breaker has tripped | Yes | Normal |
| Main switch off | Cabinet | The cabinet's main switch is off | Yes | High |
Why an open door raises no event
Someone opening the gate is routine — maintenance, a meter reading, a delivery. It is recorded as a signal and drawn on the timeline, so you can always look up when a door was open, but it never opens an event and never notifies anyone. What matters is the panel's own verdict: it raised an alarm, or it did not.
Events and Notifications
An alarm event opens the moment a signal asserts, on the timestamp the condition actually started, and stays open while it lasts. When the contact clears, Mirox closes the event automatically and records that the device itself cleared it — you never have to close it by hand, although you can still add a solution note.
Alarm events belong to their own Alarm event category, so they are never mixed into production or availability findings, and they are delivered through the same notification settings as your other critical findings (the production alarms group). Choose the channels and thresholds on your notification settings page.
A hidden alarm system is silent
Hiding an alarm system on the Components view stops it from raising events, and any event still open for it is closed. Use it for a panel that is being commissioned or replaced.
Turning the Page On
Whether a plant has an alarm system is a property of the plant, held in three states:
- Not decided yet — the default for every plant. The page and the navigation entry stay hidden.
- Set automatically, once. The first time an alarm system is discovered on a plant that has never been decided, Mirox marks the plant as having one and records that in the plant's activity log. This happens exactly once.
- Your choice wins. As soon as you set the switch yourself — on or off — discovery never touches it again. Turn it on to prepare a plant before the controller is connected, or off to hide the page on a plant that no longer has a panel.
The switch sits with the plant's master data on the Core data page, next to the battery-storage switch.
Adding the Alarm Controller
The alarm contacts reach Mirox through a WAGO PFC200 controller programmed by the plant's integrator, read over read-only Modbus TCP with no credentials. Add it like any other logger, on the plant's Data flow page — with one difference:
No auto-detection — add it by hand
A WAGO controller is a blank PLC that hundreds of integrators program for hundreds of different purposes, and nothing on the wire says which program is running. So Mirox never offers this adapter in the Possible Loggers table: a WAGO found by the network scan is a WAGO, not necessarily an alarm controller. Use Add Logger and choose the adapter yourself.
- On Data flow, click Add Logger and pick the controller from the network-device list.
- Choose the WAGO PFC200 alarm PLC adapter.
- Set the profile — which integrator's program runs on this controller. It decides what every input means. Today Mirox implements
abo_uegs, the ABO Energy transfer-station controller (ÜGS WAGO SPS): the panel's gate, alarm and fault relays plus the cabinet's UPS, heating-breaker and main-switch contacts. - Optionally give the alarm system an identifier (for example
UEGS). Nothing on the wire is a serial number, so this is the system's stable name inside the plant. Left empty, it is derived from the logger name. - Optionally tick disabled contacts — see the warning below.
- Watch the live probe: it shows every contact's current state, so you can compare the reading against the real cabinet before saving.
- Save, then Apply changes on the Data flow page.
The connection also proves the shape of the program: the profile's address windows must answer completely and the address after each must be refused. A controller running a different program is rejected instead of being read as if its inputs were alarms.
Polarity and contacts that are not wired
Half of a cabinet's contacts are wired fail-safe (open = alarm, so a cut cable alarms too) and half are not. The profile carries that per input, which is why 1 always means "condition present" on this page no matter how the contact is wired — but it also means a documented contact that was never actually connected reads its alarm polarity forever.
If a contact stands in alarm on a plant that is plainly healthy, do not accept the event: list that contact under disabled contacts on the logger. Mirox then publishes neither its signal nor its event, instead of raising an alarm nobody can clear. Have the wiring checked on site, then remove it from the list again.
Data Collection
The seven signals are collected by the edge agent's WAGO adapter and stored as the alarm_* metric family — see Metric Collection for the exact series names and the Data Scraper for how adapters read a device and standardize what they find. Contacts are read every 15 seconds by default.
If your alarm panel or cabinet is wired to a different controller, request an integration — a new profile or a new adapter is exactly the kind of thing Mirox adds on request.
Related Features
- Events — how park events are detected, prioritized, and closed
- Notifications — choosing how alarm events reach you
- Managing Data Loggers — the onboarding wizard step by step
- Metric Collection — the full metric vocabulary, including the
alarm_*family - Data Scraper — how edge adapters collect and standardize plant data