How to Get Text Alerts from Your Tridium Niagara Building Automation System

Tridium Niagara has over a million installations worldwide, and pretty much all of them can send email when something goes wrong: a chiller fault, a freeze stat trip, a VAV box that’s stopped responding, and on and on.

The only problem: Email alerts have a way of disappearing into the clutter. At 2 PM on a Tuesday, you’ll probably spot it in a relatively timely way. At 11 PM on a Saturday, you won’t.

And the alarms that matter most are the ones that happen when nobody’s watching a screen.

In this article, I’ll walk you through how to quickly turn your Niagara 4 email alarms into SMS text messages on your phone. Seriously — if you’ve already got email alarming configured on your JACE or Supervisor, the SMS piece takes about a minute.

Tridium Niagara Text Alerts: Table of Contents

• Setting Up Tridium Niagara Text Alerts
• Why Other Methods to Get Text Alerts from Niagara Aren’t Ideal (Or Don’t Work at All)
• Get Critical Niagara Alerts on Your Phone Today
• Which Niagara Alarms Are Worth Texting?
• Tridium Niagara Text Alerts: Next Steps

Setting Up Tridium Niagara Text Alerts

Step 1: Sign up with text.email

text.email is an email-to-SMS tool. You send it an email, text.email transforms it into a text.

Sign up, pick a private keyword for your account, and your delivery address becomes yournumber@yourkeyword.text.email. Any email sent to that address arrives as an SMS.

We’ll plug this into your Niagara station’s alarm routing in a moment.

Step 2: Make sure email service is configured on your station

If your Niagara station is already sending email alarms, skip to Step 3.

If not, you need to add the EmailService to your station and configure an outgoing SMTP account. This is done in Workbench — not through the web UI.

Add the EmailService

Open the email palette in Workbench. Drag and drop an EmailService object into the Services section of your station.

Then drag an OutgoingAccount object into the EmailService. Double-click the OutgoingAccount to open its property sheet.

[SCREENSHOT: Niagara 4 Workbench showing EmailService and OutgoingAccount in the Services section. Reference: One Sightsolutions has a video walkthrough at https://onesight.solutions/how-to-email-alarms-in-tridium-niagara-4/ — you may be able to capture your own screenshots from a demo station or Workbench instance.]

Configure SMTP settings

The OutgoingAccount property sheet needs your SMTP server details. Gmail is the most common choice for Niagara stations, especially on standalone JACEs where there’s no corporate mail server available.

For Gmail:

• Host: smtp.gmail.com
• Port: 587
• Use TLS: true
• Username: Your full Gmail address
• Password: A Gmail App Password (not your regular password)

About that App Password: Google killed “Less Secure Apps” access, so you can’t just use your Gmail login credentials anymore. You need to generate a 16-character App Password specifically for your JACE or Supervisor.

To get one:

1. Enable 2-Step Verification on the Gmail account. Go to Google Account → Security and turn it on.
2. Go to Google Account → App Passwords.
3. Enter a name like “Niagara JACE” and click Create.
4. Copy the 16-character password. They won’t show it again.

Use that App Password in the OutgoingAccount, not your regular Gmail password.

If you’re using Microsoft 365 or another SMTP server, the fields are the same — you just need the server address, port, and credentials from your IT team.

One thing to note: Niagara versions before 4.9 don’t support TLS 1.2, which Microsoft 365 now requires. If you’re on an older version, Gmail or a third-party SMTP is your best bet. (text.email also offers a simple SMTP relay if you need.)

Make sure CryptoService is installed

If you’re using SSL/TLS (which you should be), your station needs the CryptoService. Open the crypto palette in Workbench and drag the CryptoService into your station’s Services folder. The default properties are fine — you shouldn’t need to change anything.

Without it, you’ll get a Valid CryptoService not found error in the Application Director when the station tries to send email.

Check DNS on your JACE

This is the one that trips people up the most. If your JACE can’t resolve smtp.gmail.com to an IP address, you’ll get an UnknownHostException in the console and emails will silently fail.

Make sure valid DNS servers are configured in the JACE’s TCP/IP settings (the same place you set IP, subnet mask, and gateway). Google’s public DNS — 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 — works if your network team doesn’t have a preference.

Test the connection

Right-click on the OutgoingAccount in Workbench and choose Actions → Send. Enter a To address (your own email), a From address (the Gmail account), and a test subject/body. Check that the email arrives.

If it doesn’t, open the Application Director output. Set debug to true on the OutgoingAccount property sheet for more detailed error logging.

Step 3: Create an EmailRecipient for your text.email address

This is where Niagara’s alarm system connects to SMS delivery.

1. Open the email palette again.
2. Drag an EmailRecipient into the AlarmService section on the wire sheet.
3. Right-click the EmailRecipient and select Views → Property Sheet.
4. In the Email Account field, select the OutgoingAccount you configured earlier.
5. In the To field, enter your text.email address: yournumber@yourkeyword.text.email.

Step 4: Route your alarms to the EmailRecipient

Niagara’s alarm routing works through alarm classes. On the AlarmService wire sheet, connect the Alarm slot of the alarm class you want to text to the Route Alarm slot of the EmailRecipient.

If you only want critical alarms going to SMS, this is where you control it. Create a separate alarm class for SMS-worthy events and route only that class to the text.email EmailRecipient. Your lower-priority alarms can stay routed to your regular email recipients.

You can set up multiple EmailRecipients with different text.email addresses if you need different people to get different alarms (e.g., route HVAC criticals to the facilities manager’s phone and security events to the building engineer).

Note: If you’re also running a SCADA system alongside Niagara, the same approach works there.

Step 5: Test it

Trigger a test alarm (or use the OutgoingAccount’s Send action with your text.email address in the To field). The text should arrive on your phone within seconds.

If it doesn’t:

• Is the base email working? If the test email from Step 2 never arrived, the problem is your SMTP configuration, not the text.email address. Go back to Step 2.
• Is the text.email address correct? Double-check the format. It’s yournumber@yourkeyword.text.email — the keyword is the one you chose during signup.
• Can the JACE reach the internet? Some building networks have the controls VLAN locked down. Your JACE needs outbound access on port 587 (or 465 for SSL). Talk to your network admin.
• Is the EmailRecipient actually wired to an alarm class? Check the AlarmService wire sheet. If the EmailRecipient isn’t connected to any alarm class routing, it won’t receive anything.

Why Other Methods to Get Text Alerts from Niagara Aren’t Ideal (Or Don’t Work at All)

No, email-to-text isn’t the only way to get SMS alerts from your Niagara.

Though it might as well be…

The old “vtext.com” trick is dead

If you’re a Niagara veteran, you might have used a trick where you’d put yournumber@vtext.com in the To field of an EmailRecipient and get text messages via Verizon’s email-to-SMS gateway. AT&T had txt.att.net. T-Mobile had tmomail.net.

There are HVAC-Talk threads going back over a decade (and longer!) of people sharing that technique for getting SMS out of their Niagara stations.

Those gateways are all dead now. Verizon shut down vtext.com. AT&T killed txt.att.net. T-Mobile killed tmomail.net. The carriers pulled the plug on email-to-SMS due to something called A2P 10DLC compliance, as well as because of spam abuse.

If your Niagara station is still configured with a @vtext.com recipient, the emails are going nowhere. You won’t get an error and they won’t bounce — it’s just silent failure.

What about the Niagara Marketplace SMS drivers?

There are third-party SMS drivers on the Niagara Marketplace that use dedicated hardware (cellular modems with SIM cards) to send texts directly from your JACE or Supervisor over the cellular network. SMSEagle and the Smartnode driver are two of the main ones.

They work, but they require physical hardware on your network, per-device licensing, and a SIM card with a cellular plan.

For a large campus with strict air-gapped networks, that might be the right call. Same goes for full incident management platforms like PagerDuty if you need escalation chains and on-call schedules.

But for most facilities running standard Niagara with internet access, both are significant overhead for what amounts to “tell me when something breaks.”

Why building your own SMS pipeline is disproportionate to the problem

You could theoretically write a custom Niagara module or set up an external service to forward emails to an SMS API like Twilio. But sending application-to-person (A2P) SMS in the US now requires registration (registering your business, your message purpose, and waiting for carrier approval).

That’s the same process whether you’re sending 5 facility alarms a month or 50,000 marketing messages.

It’s also another system to maintain and another system that is fragile enough to regularly break.

text.email handles the compliance burden and system maintenance so you don’t have to.

Get Your Critical Niagara Alerts on Your Phone Today

text.email exists because the carrier gateways died and nobody replaced them with something simple. The existing alternatives either require hardware, API integration, or an incident management platform that’s wildly overkill for “my AHU tripped a freeze stat, wake me up.”

Plans include 200 SMS messages per month. For a typical building running critical-only SMS alerts, you’ll rarely approach that cap.

You can test it right now without signing up: send a pretend alert email to yournumber@text.email and you’ll get the text in seconds.

Which Niagara Alarms Are Worth Texting?

Niagara’s alarm class system makes it easy to segregate what gets texted vs. what stays on email. The key is keeping your SMS alerts reserved for things that need a human response within the hour. Otherwise, alert fatigue sets in and the texts become just as ignorable as the emails.

Always text

• Freeze stat trip.
• Chiller or boiler critical fault.
• Building power loss / UPS failover.
• Fire alarm panel communication failure.
• Generator fail to start.
• BAS controller offline. (If your Niagara Supervisor runs on a server you also want server-level monitoring alerts for, that’s a separate but related setup.)

Consider texting

• High or low space temperature alarms in critical zones. Server rooms, labs, clean rooms, pharmacy storage.
• Economizer faults.
• VFD faults on critical air handlers.
• Repeated equipment cycling.

Leave on email

• Scheduled maintenance reminders.
• Trend data reports.
• Setpoint change confirmations.
• Advisory-level notifications that don’t require immediate action.
• Normal occupancy/unoccupancy transitions.

Route your critical alarm classes to the text.email EmailRecipient. Leave everything else on standard email where it belongs.

Tridium Niagara Text Alerts: Next Steps

Ready to get these alerts going in the next few minutes?

Sign up at text.email, drop your address into a Niagara EmailRecipient on the AlarmService wire sheet, wire it to your critical alarm classes, and start getting alerts on your phone immediately.