This July, DMC competed in the preliminary round of Inductive Automation’s 2026 Build-a-Thon ahead of this year’s Inductive Community Conference (ICC), an event DMC’s Automation team is no stranger to.
Our challenge was to build a world-class alarm analysis dashboard entirely in Ignition Perspective. This year’s primary round was unique in that we had eight consecutive hours to plan, develop, test, and submit the application.
The Alarm Intelligence Center
Our goal was to build more than a list of alarms. While Ignition’s standard alarm status and journal tables serve many applications well, we wanted our dashboard to help operators understand what the alarm data was telling them.
The result was the Alarm Intelligence Center, an operator-focused dashboard organized around three questions:
- How healthy is the facility?
- Which alarms or sources need attention?
- Is performance improving over time?
The Implementation
We focused on creating a slick, intuitive dashboard that made both real-time alarm data and historical performance easy to understand at a glance.
On the backend, we used named queries and custom scripting to analyze current and historical alarm events. Using EEMUA-informed alarm management metrics, we turned that analysis into information operators could act on, including:
- Alarm rate and time spent in flood.
- Average time to acknowledge.
- Standing and chattering alarms.
- Priority distribution and historical trends.
- A Pareto view identifying the sources responsible for most of the alarm load.
We also built custom alarm status and alarm history tables that fit seamlessly with the dashboard’s visual style. The tables provided simplified filtering and controls for viewing alarm details, acknowledging active alarms, and shelving them.
The result was a polished, standards-driven dashboard that helped operators quickly understand system health, identify problem areas, and decide where to focus their attention.
DMC is proud to share that our submission received the Best Error Handling award.
The experience demonstrated what DMC does best: bring the right people together, quickly turn ideas into action, and deliver a polished solution under a demanding deadline.
Check out the project on Ignition Exchange.
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DMC helps manufacturers build intuitive SCADA applications that turn operational data into actionable information. Contact us to learn more about our Ignition programming and automation solutions.