Alarm System

Every plant has signals of its own that no inverter or meter reports: the intrusion alarm panel in the transfer station, the supervision contacts of the communication cabinet, a transformer's protection relay, a fire detection panel. Where such signals are available on 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

Signals are defined per plant. No two transfer stations are wired alike, so Mirox does not prescribe a list. The plant's technical operator defines each signal on the plant's own controller — which address it is read from, what it means, whether it only records or raises an alarm, and at which level — with the Generic Modbus reader.

A signal is one of two things:

a contact or status bit — door open, alarm raised, UPS on battery, breaker tripped;
a measured value — a cabinet temperature, a pressure — shown as a number and optionally compared against a limit.

Each signal with a condition is normalized so that 1 always means "the condition is present" and 0 means normal, whichever way the contact happens to be wired. And no reading is never a 0: a signal that could not be read 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. It is read by one reader from one device, all its signals belong to it, and everything on this page is grouped by it, so a site with two controllers 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 two tabs.

Status

What the plant's signals report right now, their history, and the alarms they raised.

Signal tiles — one live tile per signal, grouped by kind (intrusion, UPS, transformer, …). A contact tile shows the current state and how long it has been in that state; a measured value shows the number with its unit. A tile whose newest reading is too old is marked as stale, a signal in mode Off is shown as off, and when the reader cannot read the device the system says so instead of showing old values as current.
State timeline — one 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; measured values are drawn as a curve. Periods with no reading are drawn as gaps rather than as normal.
Events — the alarm events of the plant, open ones first, titled with the signal's name, with the same detail view every other park event has.
Alarm systems — the systems themselves: name, the reader 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.

Signals

What each reader of the plant reads, how the signals are classified, and whether the current definition is in operation.

A reader card per alarm system: the reader's name, the device it reads, its polling interval, whether it is reading or the device is offline or refusing addresses, and its deploy state — Not deployed yet, Changes pending or deployed. Edit signals opens the reader's workbench.
The signal table: name, kind, live value, mode (Off / Record / Alarm), level and address. Clicking a row lets you change a signal's name, kind, mode, level and unit. Name and level apply immediately; an alarm that is already open keeps who was notified for it.

Everyone who can see the plant's components sees both tabs. Changing signals is reserved for the plant's technical roles, Operator and Technical Manager.

If the plant is not marked as having an alarm system, the page explains that instead of showing empty tiles.

Modes and Levels

Each signal has a mode:

Mode	What happens
Off	The signal is not read. For a contact that is documented but not wired.
Record	The signal is read and shown on its tile and the timeline, but never opens an event and never notifies anyone.
Alarm	As Record, and the signal opens a park event at its level while its condition is present.

Why Record exists

Someone opening the gate is routine — maintenance, a meter reading, a delivery. Recorded as a signal, it is drawn on the timeline, so you can always look up when a door was open, without anyone being called for it. What deserves an alarm is the panel's own verdict: it raised an alarm, or it did not.

Each signal in mode Alarm carries one of the six alarm levels.

For signals read by the generic Modbus reader, the level is assigned by the plant's technical operator, per signal — only they know what a contact means on that plant. Every other alarm keeps its fixed, platform-defined level. Whether a signal notifies you still depends only on whether you enabled the Alarm system category and on your own minimum level there (enabled by default only for the technical manager, from Very high).

How to choose modes, conditions and levels is described step by step in the Generic Modbus reader guide.

Events and Notifications

An alarm event opens when a signal's condition is read as present, on the timestamp the condition was first seen, and stays open while it lasts. When the device reports the condition as gone, 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.

No delay, unless you ask for one. A change becomes an alarm on the next poll (default 60 s, plus about 10 s); nothing is delayed or confirmed twice. The one exception is a minimum duration the operator set on a signal: the condition then has to hold that long first, and the alarm starts when the time is reached. Clearing is never delayed.
Short pulses. The reader sees a signal only when it polls. A pulse shorter than the polling interval can be missed entirely; choose a shorter interval, or have the controller latch the signal.
Not readable. If the device does not answer three polls in a row, or keeps refusing a configured address, the plant shows 'Alarm signals not readable' — the signals are then unknown, not normal. This is an event of its own at the fixed level High. While signals are unknown, nothing is cleared: an alarm that was open stays open.

Alarm events belong to their own Alarm event category, so they are never mixed into production or availability findings. On your notification settings they have their own group, Alarm system, separate from the plant's production alarms — a burglar alarm is answered by whoever answers for the site, so the two can be switched on and off independently.

Starts at Very high. The row's default minimum level is Very high for every role, so out of the box only signals the operator placed at Very high or Critical notify. Lower the row to High or Normal to hear about more.
App only by default. The row notifies through the app (notification center and mobile push); email is off until you switch it on for the row, and webhooks are your own choice.
On by default for technical managers. The Asset Manager (Technical) role starts with the row switched on; every other role switches it on when needed.

Every alarm event sends a resolution notice when the condition clears. Both notifications — raised and cleared — name the plant, the alarm system, the signal and its type (UPS, Door / gate, Transformer, …); see Notifications. The levels, defaults and timing are listed in Alarm Levels.

A hidden alarm system is silent

Hiding an alarm system stops it from raising events, and any event still open for it is closed. Use it for a controller that is being commissioned or replaced. Hiding a system that a reader feeds silences every signal of that reader, so it needs the same technical role as changing the signals.

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 a reader is created or 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 — it is not touched again, with the one exception below. 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 one.
Reset with the last alarm system. Deleting a Modbus reader also removes the alarm system it fed, unless that system still has other signals. If it was the plant's last alarm system and the switch was on, the plant returns to "not decided yet" and the page disappears; a switch you turned off stays off. The events of the removed system stay in the plant's activity list.

The switch sits with the plant's master data on the Core data page, next to the battery-storage switch.

Adding the Alarm Controller

Alarm signals reach Mirox through the Generic Modbus reader: it reads any Modbus TCP device — a PLC, a remote I/O module, a gateway — strictly read-only and without credentials.

Make sure the controller is a network device of the plant.
On the plant's Dataflow page, click Add Logger, pick the controller and choose Generic Modbus reader (read-only).
Set the connection, define the signals with their live values in front of you, review, and deploy.

The full walkthrough — addresses and notations, data types, conditions, the live tools and the limits — is the Generic Modbus reader guide.

No auto-detection — add it by hand

A controller is programmed differently by every integrator, and nothing on the wire says what its addresses mean. So Mirox never offers the reader in the Possible Loggers table: you add it with Add Logger and define the signals yourself.

Existing WAGO Installations

Plants that were connected before the generic reader existed read their alarm contacts through a WAGO PFC200 controller with a fixed program. These installations keep working unchanged. Their seven contacts and levels are fixed by the platform and are shown read-only on the Signals tab:

Signal	Group	What it means	Raises an event	Level
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

These contacts are read every 15 seconds. A contact that is documented but was never wired can be listed under disabled contacts on the logger, so that it does not stand in alarm forever.

New installations use the generic reader. The fixed WAGO alarm profile is no longer offered for new loggers. The same controller is read with the Generic Modbus reader: add its contacts as signals — by hand, by pasting the controller's list, or with Learn — then name them, set their level, and add the controller's other inputs if you need them.

Moving an existing installation to the reader. The reader's wizard always creates a new alarm system, so a move onto the existing one is carried out together with Mirox support — contact them before you set up the reader. The history then stays on the same timeline. Alarms that are open at that moment continue without a new notification and will not send a "resolved" notice when they end.

Data Collection

Signals are collected by the plant's agent and stored as time series per alarm system and signal — see Metric Collection for the series names and the Data Scraper for how adapters read a device. The generic reader polls every 60 seconds by default (10–900 seconds, set per reader).

If your signals are not available over Modbus TCP, request an integration — a new adapter is exactly the kind of thing Mirox adds on request.

Generic Modbus Reader — defining the signals of a plant, step by step
Alarm Levels — what each level means and who is notified from which level
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 families
Data Scraper — how edge adapters collect and standardize plant data