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Sending SMS Alerts using PI Notification

Question asked by waheed71 on Mar 8, 2015
Latest reply on Mar 13, 2015 by waheed71

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Dear All,

Can anyone help to build low cost SMS Infrastructure using PI Notification? I have gone through different options and found solutions are available from OSISoft Partners but those are costly. I believe OSISoft have already provided stable and scalable platform in the shape of PI Notification so buy utilizing the Power of PI Notification and mixing different technologies, anyone can build low cost infrastructure.

I have dig out further and found that below mentioned URL could be the starting point. The only downside of this solution is dependency on SMTP Server and if that goes down or link is broken, users will be impacted. Is there any possibility within PI Notification to write directly in SQL Database or any other option?

SMS Gateway - Examples and Solutions, E-mail to SMS alert

Kind regards,

Muhammad Waheed

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7 Replies

hai.hoang Mar 9, 2015 5:29 AM
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I have never use PI Notification before, but I think that you can use one SMS module, plug it in your Server, write a windows service to read Notification using PI Notification SDK and send SMS using AT commands.
To communicate with SMS module, use RS232 COM port Library of .NET
The AT command to send SMS is only 4 or 5 command like AT+CMGS...
The cost is about 300$ for the module and programming cost is <1000 lines of .NET code.
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John Messinger Mar 9, 2015 3:17 AM
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You have a few different options here, depending on what existing or external infrastructure you have available. One possible method is to use the Web Service delivery channel that comes standard with PI Notification, and deliver your content to a SMS gateway that provides a web service. There are a large number of commercial services that provide this part of the infrastructure for varying budgets. The development cost of this approach would be fairly low, as it would mostly consist of configuration rather than writing custom code. The Web Service delivery channel doesn't support REST web services though, so that could be a limiting factor.

Another option is to write your own custom delivery channel to handle SMS notifications. We recently did this for one of our large customers. We used a library called messagingtoolkit from http://platform.twit88.com (disclaimer: I am not in any way affiliated with this site) which cost us less than US$100 to license. Yes, you could write code that directly opens a serial port on the GSM modem and then send AT commands to it (we started that way initially), but using a library that abstracts that low level stuff for you is probably an easier path. The logic for all of this could be all handled within the delivery channel.

The approach we took for our customer was a bit of a hybrid approach. As the customer's PI system components (PI Server, PI-AF and PI Notifications) were all installed on a VM which is hosted on shared VMWare infrastructure, plugging a GSM modem into the server was not an option. So, we wrote a delivery channel that would output the notification data (contact's mobile phone number, and customised message) to a JSON file in a specified network location. We also wrote a simple SMS gateway Windows service based on the abovementioned messagingtoolkit library, which runs on a physical server that does have their GSM modem plugged in, and monitors said specified network location for new message files, and converts the file contents into SMS messages to the PI Notifications subscriber. You could undoubtedly do this using a WCF service endpoint instead, but we weren't able to go down that path initially for this project.

There may be other libraries and products out there that provide SMS gateway functionality that are more suited to your needs. You asked about writing directly to a SQL database - yes, you could certainly do this. Again, writing your own custom delivery channel to handle that would be required, but this is not a difficult task.
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lmlcoch Mar 9, 2015 10:41 AM
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Check out the offering from Amitec.no:
SMS Notification - Amitec
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- waheed71 @ lmlcoch on Mar 13, 2015 1:28 PM
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  Dear Lubos,
  
  Thank you for the offer. I need to buy or develop solution and not interested in try & buy option. I have budget constraint and could not go with your solution due to high pricing.
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HenlodeWaal Mar 10, 2015 10:22 AM
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We used simple email to SMS gateway services, and it works just fine, once your credits gets low we just purchase more credits. I used a company with the name WinSMS (disclaimer: I am not in any way affiliated with this site) in South Africa, and it works like a charm. It's not perfect, but it works.
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- Maciej @ HenlodeWaal on Mar 13, 2015 7:42 AM
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  Hi,
  
  Same company, same solution. It works
  
  Maciej
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  - waheed71 @ Maciej on Mar 13, 2015 1:25 PM
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    Dear Maciej,
    
    Do you mean OSISoft or Ozeki SMS Gateway. Could you please elaborate?
    
    Regards,
    Waheed
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Sending SMS Alerts using PI Notification

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