AI World 2023 & Bullhorn Web Alerts: Virtual Brew 11/16/2023

Speakers

Ed Kruft, CEO & host

Michael Plaster, Remote Monitor Specialist

Transcript

AI World Recap

Ed Kruft
All right, so we just finished our Users Group meeting, which is called AI World. I think last year was maybe the first year we did this sort of drone picture — we did it again this year. It was probably my favorite AI World that we’ve had — I’ve been, I guess, this was my 13th or 14th. Really great event.

This is just a picture in the courtyard, where Hector, our support manager, likes to fly a drone and get some photos, so here are a few of what happened. We were at the AT&T Center again — the field trip went really well, rain cooperated incredibly all week. It said it was going to rain, and then, thankfully, literally just as we were finishing the hands-on training, it started raining and people were able to take off — so that was great.

Many of you know Clay Bedford, longtime president of Bass Engineering, now part of Mesa Products — he’s retiring in December, so we had the privilege of asking him to do a keynote presentation, which everybody loved. We also gave him a Golden Allegro — if you don’t know the history behind that, it really shouldn’t be me standing there, it should be Steve Hamlin. Steve started this years ago, when we had longtime customers essentially retire — I think this is the fourth, maybe fifth, Golden Allegro. The gentleman on the left is the CEO of Juniper Systems, who we’ve worked with for about 20 years on their handhelds.

And then we had a keynote with Jim and James — everybody’s face lit up — that was really well received, about taking control of your career and leaning in. They also did a podcast from the user conference, which was really fun, because they’d pull in — yeah, there we go, upper right-hand corner — various customers and ask them questions and insights, and then post it.

That center picture — that’s Andrew Worster attempting to look like a product model, and he’s doing an outstanding job — that’s the interruptible bond I was talking about. You can see at the top, that’s the same remote monitor that sits on top of the test head, and the thing in his left hand at the bottom, that’s a new solid-state relay intended for that.

Some fun pictures — we had a really good time. One of the things that was really neat is we had a lot of our regular folks — people who’ve come for many years, and we always love seeing them — and we had almost 44, I think about 44, first-time attendees, which is awesome. Really fun. It was a great week.

Is there anything I should add that I haven’t, from any of the AI folks on the line? No? All right, well — great.

With that being said — I timed it, of course, didn’t mean to, but it’s 9:09, so that’s perfect. Mike, I’m going to hand it over to you. Mike has been with AI, I think, for 25-plus years, and he’s been an expert in all things remote monitoring for a very long time, and remains that expert. So we asked him to come do a bit of technical training on setting up Bullhorn Web for your remote monitoring units. Mike —

Mike: Bullhorn Web Alerts Training

Mike
All right, well, welcome everybody to the November virtual brew, and today we’re going to talk about Bullhorn Web alerts. But before I can get started, I always have to start with something to think about — did you know insurance companies are now warning campers that if their tent gets stolen in the night, they’re not going to be covered? I know, it’s pretty bad — but being virtual, I don’t have anybody to throw tomatoes at me. If you didn’t make it to AI World, all I’ll say is that joke was better than his opening joke during one of his sessions. Keep them coming, though — bad jokes are fun, and that’s a good bad joke.

All right, so today we’re going to talk about what alerts are, contact groups, and setting up alerts.

So — what are alerts? Alerts are notifications we send out from the website after a unit in the field, a remote monitor, calls into the website. Whenever those units call in, we look at that data and the alerts set up for it, and determine whether any alerts have been triggered — and if so, we send out notifications, if contacts are set up, so our customers know some event has happened with the remote monitor on their asset.

So, first thing to do is log into Bullhorn Web at our login page — I’ve got the URL there in the bottom right-hand corner. After you’re logged in, go to the top of the screen and go to Admin — yes, this is an admin function for setting up contact groups, but I suggest everyone get set up in a contact group.

After you’ve selected Contact Groups, it’ll bring you to our contact group page. Click Add, and that’ll bring up a box in the middle where you can name your contact group anything you want — I’ve named it here just my division; it can be your name, anything you’ll recognize as your group. We’ve seen a lot of different things out there, and it’s up to you — it’s not something we mandate has to be set up a certain way, you just need a group name.

After you’ve got your group name set up, add contacts to that group. In this example, I’ve used my name — the contact type is email, and the contact is my email address. Then I click Add, and that adds my email address to the contact group. I’ve also added a text message in this example — you can repeat this and add as many users as you want, and it doesn’t have to be just one user; it can be emails, text messages, voicemails. For most of our cathodic protection examples, most people aren’t going to use voicemail to let them know their rectifier is down, because not many people want that call in the middle of the night saying their rectifier’s gone down — email or text usually works.

All right, now we want to go back to our All Units page. To get there, click on Bullhorn Web in the upper left-hand corner — once you click on that, it brings you to the All Units page, where all your units are listed. Then go to the pencil icon for the unit you want to set up an alert for — once you click the pencil, it takes you to the unit admin page. There’s a lot that can be done there, but today we’re just going to talk about alerts.

After you click on Alerts, it brings you to the alert screen. The alert screen’s going to have a default alert set up for power fail on almost all of our units — it won’t have any contacts set up, but we’ll talk about getting that set up in a few minutes.

So, first, click on New Alert, in the upper right. You’ll get a screen similar to this, and you’ll want to set up your alert name — for this example, low amps. It’s going to be a data alert, and then you’ll select a subject — we’ll say “low amps.” We’re going to keep that generic — the reason for that is, if you’ve used this unit as an example for a template and applied the template to other units, and you’d named this like “Milepost 27,” every time you apply the template, you’d have to go in and change the name. So keep it generic — the actual unit name will always go out with your alert, so you’ll know which unit it belongs to.

You don’t have to worry about the other things on the screen, as the defaults work great for cathodic protection. You’re not going to want to set up an acknowledgment — if you get an alert in the middle of the night saying your rectifier’s down, you don’t want to have to go click “acknowledged” on the website; you’ll check that email in the morning, or whenever you have time. It’s not usually that critical that you have to acknowledge it right away.

All right, hit Save when you’re done on this screen — I know that sounds silly, having to remind you to hit save, but yours truly was setting up this presentation and twice forgot to hit save, and had to go back and reset it up to continue getting my slides set up. So — hit save.

After you’ve got the alert name set up, you’re going to add a condition — when you hit Add Condition, you’ll get a screen like this pop up, and you’ll select the data points you want the alarm on. In this case, I’ve got Analog Channel 1 for rectifier amps, set to “less than,” and the trigger is 2 amps, and the detail I kept generic — just “low amps.” Now, I could set this up for high amps or low amps — just keep in mind, when you set it up for less than 2 amps, it’s got to be less than 2, it won’t notify you if it’s right at 2 amps. There’s a drop-down for the operator — you can say “less than or equal to,” but most of our customers just use “less than,” and then the trigger value.

Ed Kruft
Matt Kelly may be asking — oh, no, he’s providing a link. If anybody has any questions at all, please stick them in the chat right now, along the way — if you’ve been on a virtual brew before, you know that’s how we do it. We’d love for you to do it along the way — of course you’re welcome to ask afterward too, because then we can follow up with you — but if you have any questions or experiences with what Mike’s talking about, please share them.

Mike
All right, we’ll keep going from here. After you hit save for your conditions, now it’s time to set up your alerts — click on Alert Contacts, and in the lower right-hand corner you can add your contact group, the one we showed you how to set up earlier. Once you’ve got that in there, hit the green button. You won’t have to worry about broadcast, fallover, or delay — that’s more for cases where you’ve got critical alerts with multiple contacts getting notified, where somebody has to get to the website and acknowledge it before it sends to the next person.

We want to make sure you’re using contact groups instead of the individual contacts at the top — one of the main reasons is, if you’re responsible for 500 units and you’ve used an individual contact from the top, and tomorrow you win the lottery — say $10 million, $100 million — and you’re gone, the next person doesn’t want to have to go through and change each one of those alerts, deleting the individual contact and adding a new one. We’ll show you more how that’s done later.

All right, once you’ve hit the green dot, you’ll see the contact name is in the list of contacts to get notified on this alert.
So, next, we want to hit “back to alerts,” and you can see we now have a low amps alarm set up, plus our default power fail. There’s one other alert I want to show you, since these are the common alerts our customers set up — we’re going to hit New Alert, and this time it’s going to be an activity alert.

I wanted to point out the activity alert because it’s important — when you’re setting this up for “not responding” in 8 days, 14 days, or however long you’ve got set — you set it up as an activity alert, because it’s not looking for data, it’s looking for a lack of activity on the website from a unit. We’ve got this one set up for “not reporting in 8 days.”

Now, I know you’re asking — well, my units call in every 7 days, should I set it up for not reporting in 7 days? My answer is no, you don’t want to do that — the reason is, let’s say you’ve got a satellite unit that calls in every 7 days, right at 7 a.m., perfectly, and then all of a sudden it has trouble getting a signal from the satellites overhead at 7 o’clock, and it calls in at 7:25. Well, by 7:25, if you’ve set it up for not responding in 7 days, you’d have already gotten an alert saying your unit’s not transmitting. So give it one extra day to allow for late calls — that’s just going to happen occasionally with cell and satellite, you’re going to get a late packet.
After you’ve got the alert name set up, hit Alert Condition — you’ll set “less than 1 packet in 8 days.” You could also set up an alert to notify you if it’s over-reporting — you could say “greater than 5 packets in 2 days” — that way you’ll know if your unit is going in and out of alarm too often, and you need to get out there and see what’s going on at your rectifier or asset. Once you’ve got that set up, don’t forget to hit save.

All right, now, Alert Contacts — I’m going to show you something a little different here than on the last alert. We’re going to click “Add All Alerts,” then set up “Add Contact Group” — what this does is add this contact group to all of your alerts on this unit — not all the units on your website, just this one unit. So if you forget to add an alert or contact group to one, this will make sure it gets on there — and for the low amps alert, where we’ve already got this contact, it’s not going to add it twice; the website sees you’ve already got this contact set up and won’t duplicate it. So you’ll only get one contact group in there.

All right, so back on our All Units page — in the upper left, if you click on Bullhorn Web Monitoring again, it’ll bring you back to the All Units page, and what I wanted to show you here is that the amps are highlighted in yellow for this unit — and that tells me immediately that an alert has been triggered for this unit, and it’s under amps. It could be low amps or high amps, but in this case it’s pretty obvious it’s low amps, since we set it up for less than 2 amps. We can also see it’s got the red X, which tells us the unit’s in alarm, but the yellow highlight tells us what it’s in alarm for. And for the Last Packet date — if that were highlighted, that would mean the unit was triggered for not reporting in 8 days, 14 days, whatever you’ve set.

So, again, highlighted in yellow is a quick way to check why your unit is in alarm.

And, like I said earlier, you want to make sure you’re using contact groups rather than individual contacts, because you can easily delete contacts out of the group and click Add to add a new contact at any time — that way your contact group follows your asset, and you can swap out contacts. It doesn’t necessarily mean somebody left the company — it could be somebody on leave for a period of time, or on vacation for a couple weeks, and you want somebody to watch their assets and make sure nothing’s going wrong out in the field. All you have to do is click Add User Contacts, and that’ll let you add as many users as you want.

All right, I also want to point out — if you click on Bullhorn Web and then click Help, it’ll bring you to the help page, where you can go to training videos and see other videos on how things get done on Bullhorn Web. We’re always updating this, adding more content, so keep checking it out — a lot of times, instead of waiting on the phone for support, you can find your answers right here under Help.