Alerts

In order to capture as full a repertoire of natural behaviours as possible, the Aeon system is designed to monitor behaviour over extended periods in time of days, weeks or months, with no human disturbance to the animals. This presents unique challenges from a perspective of data acquisition and experimental control, since the system must be robust to, and ideally be able to recover from, system and hardware failures without constant human intervention. The Alerts module facilitates this using a system of webhooks and logs to record the state of the experiment, and to alert team members to hardware or system failures, as well as inconsistencies in data acquisition.

Nodes

SendAlert (Aeon.Acquisition) FormatLogMessage AlertGate

SendAlert

The node SendAlert (Aeon.Acquisition) accepts any string and sends it via an incoming webhook to post messages to a Microsoft Teams channel using an O365 connector. Full information on configuring these webhooks and generating a webhook url can be found in the Microsoft documentation.

Note

O365 connectors will be deprecated in the coming months. This is a known issue and an alternative will be developed and workflows updated on the public github repositories in time.

Properties

Property name	Description
ConfigFile	The full or relative path of the configuration file

This configuration file is a simple text file that specifies the name of the system and the corresponding webhook URL. For example:

AEON: https://liveuclac.webhook.office.com/webhookb2/4a6da9d9-7456-4fe8-83a7-597dc94effa9@1faf88fe-a1234-5b6c-78d9-210a11d9a5c2/IncomingWebhook/523addf421e64fbcafadc1fc358c8ccf/ec5a3255-f2d6-47ca-ab3d-a81a0c34bc60

Important

The system name in the configuration file must match the name of the computer, which can be set in Windows System Settings. In Aeon, for instance, this file is stored in a “config” folder in the root of the repository.

Usage

A PublishSubject source node is used to both declare and subscribe to a shared Subject, in this case named “EnvironmentAlerts”. Messages in the form of a string can now be sent to this Subject using a MulticastSubject node to send custom alerts on specific configured events.

FormatLogMessage

All alert messages can also be logged to file, along with other lower priority ‘notifications’ that should be logged but is not urgent enough to warrant an alert. The FormatLogMessage (Aeon.Acquisition) node formats the incoming data stream to enable the logging of alerts.

Inputs

This node will accept any input but these must contain the information required for the alert message and timestamp. The members of the input used to configure the message are set in the properties.

Outputs

A sequence of Harp.Timestamped<Aeon.acquisition.LogMessage> with the following attributes.

Attribute name	Type	Description
Priority	Aeon.Acquisition.PriorityLevel	Specifies the priority level of the alert log.
Type	string	Specifies the type of alert under which this log is stored.
Message	string	Contains the actual message content to be logged.

Properties

Property name	Type	Description
Format	string	The composite format string used to specify the output message
Selector	string	Specifies the inner properties from the input that will be included in the formatted log message
Priority	enum	Sets the priority level of the log message, Alert or Notification
Type	string	Defines the type of the log entry. Can be any string entry
Timestamp	string	The inner property selected for use as the timestamp for each element in the sequence

Usage

Prior to logging alerts, format the incoming message strings using a FormatLogMessage (Aeon.Acquisition) node. Once formatted, these timestamped messages can be Multicast to a shared “AlertLogs” Subject, allowing for the logging of both notifications and alerts.

The shared “AlertLogs” Subject is then provided as an input to the LogData (Aeon.Acquisition) node, which writes the log data to the specified file.

AlertGate

Many alerts may be triggered by events that occur at high frequency when in a faulty state. For example, if a device is desynchronised, then an alert will be generated every second until this condition is no longer true. In order to avoid unneccessary, repetitive alerts and overinflated alert logs, an AlertGate (Aeon.Acquisition) node can be used to throttle specific alerts.

This node simply accepts any input stream, but only returns elements that arrive within the AlertRefractoryPeriod property:

Specific use cases for formatting and sending alerts are detailed in individual module references.