(FAQ) Cloud Notify – All you need to know

What is Cloud Notify?

Cloud Notify is a revolutionary method to easily receive notifications from your machine(s) in a robust and safe way. Alarms and notifications can now be configured remotely in just a fraction of your time without hassling with connectivity issues, time consuming on-site configurations or difficult integrations. Whether your machine has a malfunction, is short on supply or it’s job has finished, you and other interested parties can remotely get informed to act instantly without worrying to miss out on important machine events.

You can configure any variable as trigger, but let’s take a temperature and set the alarm condition to when 60°C is exceeded. If this happens, the alarm condition is met and all users (configurable) will receive a message, e-mail, and push notification, once. For this to happen again, the alarm condition will have to be false first (below 60°C).

There are no limitations on the number of configurable notifications. Notifications can be set by priority: high, medium, or low. Cloud Notify is equipped with a clear management tool to control which users and user groups receive notifications, adjustable for each priority level.

Additionally, a custom ON-delay can be set to prevent inessential notifications. Every notification can also be given a custom message, e.g. instructions or an extended description about the corresponding notification.

How can I activate Cloud Notify?

When you want to try Cloud Notify, you can start a 30 day free trial. After that, you have to purchase a Cloud Notify license.

How do I use Cloud Notify?

Follow these next few steps to get your Cloud Notify all set up.

• Step 1: Activate Cloud Notify or start the 30 day free trial.
• Step 2: Set up a data source. Here you select (1) your communication protocol (i.e. Modbus) and (2) add the variables that you’re interested in.

Already have a data source?If you’ve already created a data source for Cloud Logging, you can use that same data source for Cloud Notify.

• Step 3: Set up alarms. Here you set up your alarms. An alarm is based on a variable, which you added in step 1, and the condition that you define for the alarm to trigger.
• Step 4: Set alarm triggers. You can determine who gets notified about which alarms, depending on the severity of the alarms.

How do I send e-mails from my machine?

You can send e-mails directly from your machine if you are using a public SMTP server, assuming your machine supports this functionality. All you need to configure in X4 Remote is to allow access to the internet. You’ll also need to configure the machine itself. Contact your mailing provider for those details.

If you have no public SMTP server available, or perhaps the machine does not support the public SMTP server’s security requirements, then you can use Cloud Notify to still receive e-mails from your PLC/HMI. Simply follow the steps explained at “How do I use Cloud Notify?” and at step 2 you’ll want to specifically add an SMTP data source.