Here I'll be showing you how to
customize your notifications message format
to send just the specific details in your
message that make the most sense for your user,
and to be able to really specify the format. In the previous video,
we setup this notification
for the unplanned maintenance equipment downtime.
And for the format, we
are just using the global default email
format here. As a result,
when our notifications were generated, we
received a message like this. And this provides us some
basic information like for example what
was the name of the event, what piece of
equipment is affected and where it's
from. As well as things like the start time. But
there might be some other information that we'd
like to include instead. For example in
my case, I would like the subject message
to actually say why the downtime
is occurring and what piece of equipment it's
on. Maybe I'd like to know additional information
like what shift is this occurring in?
And things like what is the current status of the piece of
equipment when the notification
actually gets sent? So these are all things that we can go
ahead and customize and setup. And as a result,
we would get a notification that looks like
this. So I'm going to show you how you can
customize your formats.
To do this we are going to go ahead and
back in PI System Explorer, pick our
specific notification rule
which in this case this particular notification
rule template that I'm working with.
And this is all done under manage
formats for our particular notification.
So right now there is the global
default email and if we look at this message
here, we can see that this format is actually read only.
So we don't make changes to the global default email
here but we can go ahead and copy
it and use it as a template which is something
that I'll do here in addition
to duplicating it and creating a copy
and working off of that and changing it. You
can also just start from scratch using
this button here to create a new format.
So in my case let me go ahead and rename
this so I'll be really clear what this format
is.
And now I'm going to go
ahead and start. You'll notice that I'm now able to
for example make some
changes. So let's go ahead and start with
modifying the subject like I had mentioned
earlier. And the information that we can
include in our notification
could be obviously type free
text but there is also over here on the
right, all of the additional things that we can
bring in. Like for example
properties of our AF Server or
Database. Or the notifications as well as things from the Event
Frame or the element templates.
So let's start with the subject.
I'm going to go ahead and start
here and the first thing I want to do is
put the reason that this is
occurring. And in my case, the reason would be unplanned
maintenance but that's actually the
value of the fault code at the start time of the Event
Frame. And I can get that attribute
if I go over to the Event Frame
attributes and actually
pick the fault
code and I could do for example the value of the
attribute at the start time of the Event Frame. So
I'll go ahead and bring that here.
And again
essentially what we are doing is specifying
specific Event Frame attributes that we
want to bring in. We could for example include
their name, their values as well as the timestamp.
So this is all information that we can
add to our notification. And the way that we
add it you can see it is
essentially, I have basically selected one and
dragged it over. So let's keeping
working on the subject here. So fault code which is going to be
our unplanned maintenance and I'm going to
go ahead and add some text here.
So this would be occurring on. And
now I would like to go ahead
and make this section
save the path of
the element. So I'm going
to go ahead and add that by going
to our element
templates and one of the
properties of our element template is the
name. So I can do the name but in my case I
want to do the whole element hierarchy, so I'll pick the
path. So I'll select and I'll hold and I'll
drag it over just like that.
And I can do all of the
configuration in the same manner.
There is a couple of really useful things that I
want to point out. You'll notice that there is this
notification roll message for close notification
and that's a nice thing to leave in
if you want the subject to say whether or not the Event Frame
has been closed. So by comparison,
we can see that that's the message that got
written right here.
And so if I was just looking at the emails, I could see right
away that this is something that's already been fixed,
there is no longer a problem.
So now I'm going to go ahead
and change the body of the email
as well to be exactly the format type that I'm interested
in. So I've just about
made this notification format
exactly the way I wanted to. Basically
I ended up bringing in information not
only from my Event Frame attributes
but also from
those that are part of
my element, say from my element template.
As well as just properties of the element like its
name and path. So these are all things I was able
to add as well as specific Event Frame
properties.
And in addition to using the select
and then drag and drop technique
that I taught you, there is actually one more thing that you could
do. If you have the cursor in
the body, you can actually pick an item and
double click on it and that will also add
it. And the one thing I just added was
this event details hyperlink which is a new
option that is really helpful if you want
people to be able to look at a
visualization of the event with a web browser.
In addition to customizing the text
and the content, we can also do custom formatting.
In my case, maybe I want to
bold specific items.
Or have them be
highlighted in a specific color.
So maybe if the notification is
closed, in that case there will be this message
here and I want it to be highlighted in
green. So if there is a green line in the email, I now right
away that things are in a good state.
And again just really customize this
to meet your needs.
Once you
are finished and everything looks
good, you could also go ahead and use the
preview options if you want to see how it
looks. In my case I'm going to go ahead and hit
OK. Now just because we've created a new
format, that doesn't mean that our subscribers are going to
receive that format. To configure this,
we'll need to go to edit
subscriptions and right
now you can see that we have
the global default email selected.
But in my case, I
want to go ahead and change this to our
new equipment downtime
email. So I'll go ahead and make that configuration
change and then I'll go
ahead and check in these changes.
OK,
so now we've changed
the subscription format
and you might have noticed that while
we did have that new format
available when we went to edit subscriptions, that's only going to be
for this particular notification
rule template. However you can
actually setup global formats like the
global default email that we saw.
To set those up, that's actually under
tools and then global formats.
So this is where changes could be done to
the global default email if you have the
appropriate permissions. Or
you could go ahead and create a new
default global format. And again,
there are similar options here
but keep in mind you won't have the Event
Frame attributes or
the referenced element attributes. These are
something that would have to get
added for a specific Event Frame. But you can still setup a
global format for some specific information that's
important to get included in any
notification and make a copy of that and
add-on to it in a given notification.
In the next video we'll look at how
we can go ahead and actually customize
who receives the notifications using
groups and things called escalation teams.