How to Get Critical SMS Alerts from PI Vision

PI Vision (and the PI Notifications Service powering it) does a great job with some alerts. Whether it’s running under a refinery, power plant, water district, or anywhere else, it’s got you covered.

The severity colors do their job on the wall display. The email notifications land in your inbox. All good.

But somewhere in your head you’ve decided that the most critical alerts should hit your phone as a text.

PI Notifications ships exactly two delivery channels, Email and Web Service. There’s no SMS channel to switch on. AVEVA was even asked to add one and declined.

The good news is… you don’t need one.

There’s a pretty popular workaround you can use, which is using an email to SMS service to turn those notifications into texts instantly.

Here’s how to set them up.

PI Vision Text Alarms: Table of Contents

• How to Set Up Text Alarms from PI Vision / PI Notifications
• Other Ways to Get Critical Alerts from PI Vision
• Get Your PI Vision SMS Alerts Going in the Next 10 Minutes
• How to Choose Which PI Vision Alerts Deserve a Text
• Time to Get Your PI System Texting You

How to Set Up Text Alarms from PI Vision / PI Notifications

If email notifications already work at your site, most of this is already done and you’re really only changing one address.

Step 1: Get your email-to-text address

Head over to text.email. It’s the easiest way to get email to SMS alerts (signup is super fast, and it handles all the regulatory work for you).

You’ll get a special email address (your-number@your-subdomain.text.email) and anything emailed to that address arrives on your phone as an SMS.

Copy down that address. It’s what you’ll drop into the To Email field a few steps down.

Step 2: Confirm PI’s email delivery channel is set up

If your PI Notifications already send email, skip this: SMTP is configured and nothing here needs to change for SMS. The gateway just receives mail the same way any other recipient does. Jump to Step 3.

If this is the first time email is going out of PI Notifications, this is the one-time piece, and it’s the one part that may pull in IT (an SMTP relay, the Windows service install, a firewall rule for outbound mail).

In PI System Explorer (PSE), select Contacts in the Navigator, then go to Tools > Delivery Channel Plugins, right-click the Email entry, and choose Settings. That opens the Email Delivery Channel Configuration dialog.

The PI Notification Scheduler Service has to be restarted before SMTP changes take effect. So save and then restart.

Step 3: Add the contact that gets the text

In the PI System Explorer Navigator, go to Contacts, then New > New Contact (or pick a contact that already exists).

Right-click the contact and choose New Delivery Endpoint. Set the Delivery Channel dropdown to Email.

Now, under Email Configuration > Addresses, leave To Email Type as Email Address, and in To Email, paste in your text.email address.

Set From Email to Global or Custom, then check in your changes.

Remember: A text contact is just a normal email contact whose To Email is a gateway address. PI Notifications doesn’t know or care that the message lands on a phone; it sends the same email it always sends.

Step 4: Set up a notification rule for critical events

Next up, select the element or element template on which you want alerts. For a template, use the Notification Rule Templates tab; for one specific element, use the Notification Rules tab.

Click the blue link to create a new rule.

Give it a Name and Description, set a Category if you use them, and find the Trigger section.

Click View/Edit Trigger to open the criteria dialog.

You’ve got two Criteria Modes to choose from:

• Analysis fires when an event frame from a specific analysis is created, good when one analysis owns the condition.
• Event Frame Search fires on event frame name, template, or category, good when you want to catch a class of events regardless of which analysis produced them.

Later in this article I’ll share some thoughts on which alerts warrant a text.

Step 5: Subscribe your contact to the rule

In the rule’s Subscriptions section, click View/Edit Subscriptions, then drag your contact (or the specific delivery endpoint) into the Subscriptions list.

You’ll see a Name column, a Configuration column for which message format it uses, and a Notify Option column where “Event start” is the usual choice.

Step 6: Write a message a phone can actually read

The default email format is built for an inbox: long, HTML, generous. A text wants the opposite.

Open the format editor from Tools > Global Formats for the global default, or from the rule’s Subscriptions pane via Manage Formats > Message Formats for one that’s specific to this rule.

The editor gives you Design, HTML Preview, and Plain Text Preview tabs, a Subject field, and a content pane full of drag-and-drop tokens: Event Frame Name, Description, Start Time, End Time, Severity, Trigger Name, Target Path, and more.

For SMS, work in plain text and keep it lean. The tokens that earn their space on a small screen:

• Event Frame Name: what tripped
• Severity: how much you should care
• Start Time: when it started
• Target path: which asset

There’s also an Event Details Hyperlink token that opens the event straight in PI Vision. It’s useful when you’re at a desk; on a phone, a tappable link can make the message bulky and awkward.

Add it if your recipients want the jump-back, skip it if they just need the heads-up.

When the format reads cleanly, use Test Send to push one to yourself and check it on the actual phone before you lean on it.

A token that renders fine in Plain Text Preview can still look off once a carrier chews on it.

Other Ways to Get Critical Alerts from PI Vision

The email-to-gateway route is the easiest because it asks the least of your PI System, but it’s worth seeing what else is on the table. (Partly so you know you’re not missing a cleaner switch, and partly because a couple of these look promising until you read the fine print.)

A purpose-built PI add-on

Yes, this exists.

There’s Amitec’s SMS Notification for PI AF, which is the closest thing to a native option. It rides the Web Service channel, installs a Windows Service on your AF server, uses Vonage to actually send SMS messages, and configures inside PSE like the rest of your notifications.

For an enterprise that wants SMS as a managed, supported piece of the stack, it’s a legitimate choice. It’s also a whole lot more to configure and a licensed, recurring commitment.

In other words: That’s not a 10-minute setup like the email-to-text method — and not a set-it-and-forget-it solution.

Paging platforms like SeQent

SeQent FirstPAGE / Alarm Notification Software integrates through PI data access and can send SMS.

If you’re outfitting a control room that pages people across several channels, it’s built for that.

For just getting an alarm onto a phone, it’s serious overkill.

Wait… doesn’t my cell phone service offer email-to-text already?

They used to. Email-to-text addresses like txt.att.net and vtext.com were a popular PI workaround.

For a while they worked. They don’t anymore.

Over the past few years, every cell phone carrier has discontinued their email to text service. The main reasons are spam and new regulations; either way, those gateways are gone and not coming back.

text.email is the closest drop-in replacement.

Building your own using an SMS API

The Web Service delivery channel can call out to a SOAP web service, and that service can hit an SMS API like Twilio or Vonage, or drive a GSM/3G/4G modem on site.

The catches are real, though. The channel speaks SOAP only, no REST, so you’re either fronting a modern API with a SOAP shim or living with that constraint.

There’s a whole regulatory maze (called A2P 10DLC) that you’ll have to deal with, so this isn’t exactly a quick option.

And most of all: it’s a development project. If you’ve got the developer and the appetite to maintain it, it’s solid. If you don’t, it’s a standing liability.

Get Your PI Vision SMS Alerts Going in the Next 10 Minutes

So there are a handful of steps to get your SMS alerts, yes.

But… the one-time SMTP setup is already done if your email notifications work. So drop in your text.email address, create your alerting rule, and you’re good to go.

Grab your email-to-SMS address from text.email. (You can even try it out free without signing up; send a test to your-number@text.email to see it in action.)

How to Choose Which PI Vision Alerts Deserve a Text

A text is an interrupt; it should mean look now. The goal is to split the action-now events from the for-the-record ones, and PI gives you the labels to do it cleanly.

You already see the built-in severity ladder on the display:

• Critical: 5, red
• Major: 4, orange
• Minor: 3, yellow
• Warning: 2, blue
• Information: 1, green
• None: 0

The top of that ladder are the alerts worth a text:

• Equipment shutdown or unplanned downtime (an event like 'Press Status' = "No Operator", tagged Major).
• A process excursion past limits.
• Supply material below a critical minimum.
• A runtime or maintenance counter elapsing.

Fine on email is the lower tier, real information, just not interrupt-worthy:

• Information-severity states like Planned Maintenance or a Press set-up.
• Planned-downtime reason codes.
• Routine status changes sitting in the Minor and Information band.

Time to Get Your PI System Texting You

Your PI System is already good at detecting events, ranking them by severity, and pushing out email notifications.

The only thing it can’t do on its own is send you a text: there’s no SMS channel, and AVEVA isn’t adding one.

But you now have the solution. Grab an email-to-text address from text.email and use that for your alerts. And now, the next Critical alert will arrive as a text instead of as an email languishing in your inbox.