Alert Plus collects every alarm in the building in one place, whether it comes over BACnet, Modbus, KNX or DALI, lets you define the alarm classes yourself and adds prioritization, audible announcement, email and mobile notifications, an audit trail and much more, and runs embedded in the automation server's SCADA screen: an alarm management application.
Control is not enough; you have to watch
It is not enough for a building to be run; it has to be watched continuously. Each of dozens of subsystems produces its own warning: a fault, a threshold crossed, a battery going weak. When those warnings are not brought into one order, a critical alarm gets lost among hundreds of trivial notifications; alarms arriving back to back leave the operator unable to act; and it becomes unclear which alarm was acknowledged, by whom and when. The alarm discipline that large BMS platforms matured over years was the layer missing from the automation server until now. Alert Plus fills that gap.
It takes the screen itself
Alert Plus runs embedded inside the automation server's SCADA graphic screen; no separate alarm station, no extra hardware and no second piece of software is needed. Its most decisive feature is this: whatever page the operator happens to be on, the alarm screen comes to the front by itself the moment an alarm occurs. The alarm does not wait to be noticed; it takes the screen directly. Seeing a critical situation immediately is guaranteed by the design rather than by habit.
The alarm engine
Alert Plus does not treat an alarm as a simple on/off record; it manages every alarm as a live record whose state it follows from the moment it appears until it closes. The alarm's condition and whether the operator has seen it are tracked separately; when the condition clears, the alarm returns to normal by itself. Every alarm carries a priority in the 0-255 range, where a lower number is more urgent — that inverted logic comes from the international building automation standard. An alarm takes its color, its sound and its acknowledgment and note rules from the alarm class it belongs to: the behavior is defined once for alarms of similar importance, and every alarm that falls into the group inherits it. An alarm repeating at short intervals is collapsed onto one line with a counter; if known maintenance is under way, the alarm is shelved with a duration and a reason, and it is not lost.
The standards behind it
The alarm model in Alert Plus is designed around the established principles of industrial alarm management: ANSI/ISA-18.2 and IEC 62682 for the alarm lifecycle and its states, EEMUA 191 for alarm rationalization and a balanced priority distribution, and BACnet (ISO 16484-5) for the 0-255 priority and notification class concepts. This is a design and conformance approach.
The right alarm to the right person
A critical situation is both seen and heard on the screen; because only the highest-priority alarm sounds at any moment, there is no noise pollution. Every email and notification recipient has their own priority threshold: the facility manager receives only the most critical alarms, while the technician on site receives almost all of them. Alarms that pass the threshold are not sent one by one but gathered into a single summary; the same notification also arrives instantly in the automation server's own mobile app. None of this needs a third-party service.
Local and continuous
All the alarm data and all the alarm logic sit on the automation server; even if the internet or the cloud connection drops, collecting, prioritizing and auditing alarms carries on without interruption. The persistent local database holds millions of records safely; the measured capacity is 3 million alarms. A backup is downloaded by hand or sent to a file server on a schedule. In the end the data stays on the customer's own hardware and belongs to the customer.
Plug-and-play integration
Every application on the server passes its alarm to Alert Plus in a common, standard form. Whether the source is BACnet, Modbus, KNX or DALI, the alarm is collected at the application layer and is therefore independent of the field protocol. When a new application is added to the server, its alarms start flowing to the center without any extra setting. For example, when the emergency lighting application detects a battery or converter fault in a luminaire, the fault drops into the central list on its own; even the alarm classes it needs are created automatically, with a suggested color and sound.
The application in that example is described on the Emergency Lighting and DALI Faults page.
The operator screen
The screen the operator looks at all day is the live alarm list. Four live counters sit at the top: all open alarms, those not yet acknowledged, those still active and those shelved. Each row shows its severity by color; the state cell summarizes at a glance whether the condition persists and whether the alarm has been seen. Acknowledging an alarm means "I have seen this and taken it on"; in critical classes the operator also writes what they did, and every action goes into an audit trail that cannot be altered afterwards. A forgotten filter cannot hide critical alarms; the filter clears itself after a set time. The list on screen is exported to a report with all its fields, for a shift handover or an audit.
How Alert Plus works: introduction
What Alert Plus does: collecting alarms in one place, prioritizing them, bringing the screen to the front on an alarm, and getting notifications to the right person.
Frequently asked questions
Does Alert Plus depend on the cloud?
No. The alarm logic and the data run locally on the server; email and mobile notifications are optional channels.
Which standards is it aligned with?
It is designed to be in line with the principles of ISA-18.2, IEC 62682, EEMUA 191 and BACnet.
Can alarms from different protocols be managed together?
Yes; BACnet, Modbus, KNX and DALI alarms are collected into a single framework at the application layer.
How is it added to the SCADA screen?
It is embedded into a graphic page as a window; when a critical alarm arrives, the alarm page comes to the operator's screen by itself.
How is it installed?
It installs from the store in Sona Application Center with the BMS category; when installation finishes it appears as an application on the server's main screen.
How do alarms reach email and the phone?
Every recipient has their own priority threshold; alarms that pass it are not sent one by one but gathered into a single summary and sent by email. The same notification also arrives in the automation server's mobile app. No third-party service is needed.
How long is the alarm history kept?
The alarm history and the action record are kept in the persistent local database on the server; the measured capacity is 3 million alarms. A backup can be downloaded by hand or sent to a file server on a schedule.
Alert Plus is included in the BMS license and installs from the store in Sona Application Center.
The application runs on the Sona BMS automation server. If touch panels are wanted on the site, SonaHMI panels connect to the same platform.
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