A location is a specific point that is being monitored by a temperature logger e.g. a fridge or freezer. It is not a physical address – that’s more likely to be a “site”. This page explains the specific meaning and recommendations for the configuration of a location.

Device = Logger = Location (sort of)

It can be helpful to understand that the terms Device, Logger and Location are very similar.

A Device is any device that can be seen by the Gateway. (At present, this is always a Logger.) We use this term for an item in the Devices list.

A Logger is what we call the actual physical tag that goes into the fridge.

A Location is a configuration. This includes the identification of a Logger. Locations appear in the Locations page.

Log interval

The logger interval is how often the temperature will be stored in the database. It is important that you get this reasonably right. If you sample too slowly,

you may miss a critical event. For example, if you sample once every 12 hours then it is possible for your fridge to warm up, be too hot for 10 hours, and cool down again without you knowing.
you can’t accurately work out how long a problem lasted. For example, if you sample once an hour and you have one high reading, you don’t know if it lasted 5 minutes or 1 hour and 55 minutes. All you know is 1 hour ago it was good and one hour later it was good again. That’s 2 hours apart!

If you sample too quickly then

Your reports fill up with a huge amount of data. It’s not the end of the world, but is a bit overwhelming.
You will just see the same temperature being repeated because temperature really doesn’t change that fast.

We generally recommend once every 5 minutes. This is the required interval in the Strive for 5 vaccine storage guidelines. Some people make the mistake of thinking they are replacing a twice daily min/max thermometer with a logger and set the sample rate to 12 hours. This is NOT how loggers work. You need to set the sample rate to something useful like 5 minutes. We can’t stress this enough. The lowest we would recommend setting it would be 15 minutes. I know someone who set it to 1 hour but they literally said “I don’t care what the temperature is, I just need to show the boss a reading once an hour”.

Type of alerts that Clever Logger sends

The rest of the configuration pages have to do with alarm settings. The benefit of Clever Logger is that it knows what is happening and can notify you of a possible problem, and can notify you when the problem stops. The types of issues Clever Logger can identify are:

Too hot
Too cold
Too humid (humidity loggers only)
Too dry (humidity loggers only)
Off line (i.e. the logger isn’t communicating with the server)
Low battery

Threshold

For each type of alert, there is a specific trigger. For temperature related alarms, the threshold is the temperature at which the alarm will be generated.

For vaccine fridges the temperature range is typically 2°C to 8°C. (NOTE: That is 2°C and not -2°C).

For food fridges the temperature range is typically 0°C to 5°C. The food standards are written around 5°C for potentially hazardous foods.

Generic alarm settings

The Clever Logger alarm settings are designed to

minimise false alarms being sent to you,
ensure the right people are notified if a problem occurs,
remind them in an appropriate manner,
escalates the notifications to other people if necessary

Enabled

If you don’t want to be notified of that specific alarm type then turn “Alarms Enabled” off.

Note: If you disable the high or low temperature alarms, and the temperature goes beyond what you see here, NOTHING HAPPENS. The temperature indicator will still show green.

It is possible to enable alarms (i.e. have the temperature go to red) but not have any notification groups enabled. This means no one will be told about it. It just changes the dash board colours.

Delay

To avoid false alarms, it is possible to specify a delay before an alarm is generated.

For example, if the temperature heats up but returns back to normal within that delay period then no alarm is created.This is useful for where a fridge may be regularly opened and is continually nudging the upper limit. You won’t have numerous alarms, but if the fridge fails, or the door left open then you will be notified.

A 10 to 15 minute delay is recommended for most applications.

On many freezers a very noticeable defrost cycle may exist. In this case the delay needs to be longer than the defrost cycle time. The side effect of this, however, is that if the freezer does fail, there will be a delay before you are notified.

Offline

The server expects to hear from the logger once every sample rate. The offline alarm is generated when the server has not heard for the logger. The actual time it waits is user configurable. The default is good for most installations. Reasons to extend it include:

The logger is in a truck/car/eski and is regularly away from the gateway. Set the delay to be longer than the largest expected time that the logger is away. Most users still want an offline alarm to ensure the logger isn’t lost or broken.
The internet is unreliable and is known to go down for short periods.
The logger is a distance away from the gateway and comms is unreliable. NOTE: We recommend that you try to fix the problem and not just cover it up with an extended delay.

Notification Groups

The notification group is who will be notified in the event of the alarm occurring.

Depending upon the number of notification groups in the system, you may see a list of all notification groups, or the list of only the ones assigned to the location at the moment.

A notification group is a collection of users. By default, there are two notification groups in every system:

1. All users, emails only.

2. All users, phones only (note that they need to install the Clever Logger app on their phone and log in to be added to this group).

For many users, there will only be the one person (you) in the notification groups. For larger organisations, you may have multiple notification groups based on site/department or roles.

Enabling a notification group is telling Clever Logger to send notifications to ALL THE USERS within that notification group when this type of alert is generated.

The reason why there is an email group and a phone notification group is mainly in regards to

how often we send reminders, and
when we stop sending reminders

With phone notification, our goal is to alert you of a possible problem. We do this by frequently reminding you, and stopping when you acknowledge that you are aware of the problem.

With email notifications, our goal is to alert you of a possible problem and to continue to remind you until it is resolved. To avoid filling up your inbox with too many emails the repeat interval, by default, is significantly slower than the phone interval.

For each notification group linked to the alert, you have the following options:

Escalation Delay

This is how long after the alarm was created that the notification group will start to be notified. (i.e. it is the alarm delay PLUS the notification group delay).

This is useful for escalating the alarm. For example, you can have one notification group that is immediately notified (escalation delay = 0), and another group that is notified if there is no response after an hour (escalation delay = 60). This gives the first person an hour to respond, and then starts to annoy other people.

NOTE: If the alarm is acknowledged within the delay period, the notification group may NOT be notified depending upon the “repeat until” setting.

TIP: You can have people being notified via email without being notified on their phone. This is a handy way to notify them without interrupting them.

Repeating notifications

It is possible for a notification to be resent over and over again. There are two intents with this feature:

1. Ensure someone is aware of the problem

2. Ensure the problem is fixed

The settings allow you to decide what your priority is. The default settings will achieve both.

Repeat until…

This determines what will stop the alarm repeating. Options include:

“Repeat disabled” – only the initial alarm and end of alarm notification will be sent
“Acknowledged” – this is the pressing of the “acknowledge” button within the software. This simple indicates to Clever Logger that at least one person is aware of the problem. It is very useful for phone notifications where you don’t want to be continually pinged throughout the night by a problem someone else is already dealing with.
NOTE: One person acknowledging the alarm will stop it for ALL users.
“Fixed” means the alert condition has now returned back to normal. By default, all email notifications are until fixed.
“Acknowledged OR ended” will stop when the problem either goes away or a user indicates they know about it. This is a good option for phone alerts and offline alarms.
“Closed” means the alarm was acknowledged, the problem is fixed, and the alarm is then “closed” in the app. This is useful for where you want the user to record notes as to how the problem was resolved.

TIP 1: You can have users within a notification group but not receive the repeat notifications by disabling this option in the notification group.

TIP 2: If this seems overly complex, stick with the defaults. If someone doesn’t want the alerts, simply remove them from the notification group.

Notification groups, multiple users, and these settings is a big top for larger sites. We have more information available at the page below. It also has links to all the pages associated with managing users and notification groups.