Managing Sensors

Sensors are the bread and butter of the Critical Labs application. Sensors are what give you insight into what's going on in your equipment at any given time.

In Critical Labs, sensors are a single piece of data (such as temperature or system status) that gets read over time by the Critical Labs gateway and can be displayed in a view and alerted on.

There are a couple of different ways to manage sensors - you will find links to them throughout the application, but the best way to manage all of your sensors at once is from the Equipment page.

Viewing Sensors

To view a device's sensors, first navigate to the Gateway page, then select a piece of equipment.

From the Equipment page, you will see detailed equipment info on the left side of the page and a list of the sensors on the right. From here you can quickly see the status of the sensor (Ok, Warning, Critical, or Disconnected), the current reading, and the last time a reading was reported.

To get more information on the sensor simply click on the one that you are interested in. This will take you to the Sensor Details page.

Here you will find information such as the protocol used, the current status, alarm thresholds, and which views this sensor is displayed in.

Editing Sensors

To edit a single sensor, click the edit icon to the right of the Sensor header from the Sensor Details page. This will take you to the Edit Sensor page.

From here you can modify the name of the sensor, the display unit, alarm thresholds, and the alarm deadband. To learn more about alarm thresholds and deadband, click here (coming soon).

To bulk edit sensors, navigate to the Equipment page and select the edit icon to the right of the Equipment header.

This will take you to the Add Sensors page, from here you can view and modify the name, unit, and alarm thresholds of your sensors.

Adding/Deleting Sensors

To add a sensor, navigate to the Equipment page and select the edit icon to the right of the Equipment header.

This will take you to the Add Sensors page. Here you will see a list of all of the sensors that are available on this template. To add the sensor, simply click the checkbox in the lefthand column. To remove it, deselect the checkbox.

Two types of sensors are displayed in this list, State and Value.

State and Value Sensors

Value sensors are sensors the correspond to a single numeric value, such as temperature. State sensors have a set of predefined values. A common example of a state sensor is system status, which might have the states "Normal", "Abnormal", or "Standby". Another example of a state sensor would be a sensor that determines whether cooling state is "On" or "Off".

You can learn more about how to setup state sensors in Setting States for State Sensors in Critical Labs. 

Displaying more sensors

The Add Sensors page only shows 20 sensors at a time. If you don't see the sensor you are looking for, don't forget to scroll to the bottom to see if there are more sensors on the next page.

Bulk-adding sensors

To bulk add all of the sensors displayed, click the topmost checkbox in the lefthand column. Deselecting this checkbox will auto deselect all of the sensors on the page.

** Note: this will only select the sensors displayed on the page. To bulk add all of the sensors, you will have to click through all of the pages and select the topmost checkbox. There is also a separate checkbox for both Value and State sensors. **

Once you have finished selecting/deselecting your sensors, click Finish.

Next Up -> Views and View Templates