How to Configure Penalty Box

Owned by Ramya Raman (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Mar 22, 2023
3 min read

When alarms are triggered due to events based on the Thresholds Configuration, MCS reports the events through various Notification Agents. The dynamic feature of Penalty Box enables displaying errors on the mosaic display based on the severity of the Thresholds. On MCS, you can either assign one tile for Penalty Box and have other tiles for static display or keep a dedicated Layout for Penalty Box display based on your choice.

Follow the steps below to configure the Penalty Box.

In the Penalty Box screen, there are three collapsable buttons on the right side, Sources, Layout/Tiles, and List, as high-lighted below to collapse/uncollapse Available Sources, Available Layout/Tiles, and List.

  • Available Sources : The list of scanned sources (monitored/unmonitored) available in the source configuration is displayed here.

  • Available Layout/Tiles : Lists all the Layouts and Tiles configured in the Output Layouts Configuration.

    • Layouts : Both the default and user-defined Layout configured under Outputs → Layout Configurations are listed here.

    • Tiles : Based on the Layouts selected, all the corresponding Tiles are displayed. For example, in this example, Layout test_789 is selected, and it has five tiles that are displayed, as shown below.

  • List : Lists all the user-defined Penalty Boxes.

 

Click on the add icon to add a new Penalty Box (my_penalty).

 

Fields

Description

Label

Name of the Penalty Box.

Min Display Time (sec)

Specifies the channel's minimum time to appear on the Penalty Box display, even if the event that triggered the channel display is no longer active.

Decay Time (sec)

Specifies the channel's display time after the triggered event becomes inactive.

Severities

Select the severities of the event that needs to be triggered on the Penalty Box.

Sources

The channels that need to be on the Penalty box are dragged and dropped on to the Sources columns

Destinations

The Layouts/Tile that should be assigned of the events triggered on the Penalty Box is dragged and dropped in the Destinations column.

 

Each tile in the Layout has a Tile Number. These details can be found in Outputs → Layouts Configuration as shown below.

In this example, Source 239.0.0.10:2000 is assigned to Layout test_789, first tile Layout test 789 Tile #1, with severity Critical. All the critical events triggered for the source 239.0.0.10:2000 will be displayed on the tile Layout test 789 Tile #1. The remaining tiles are assigned for static display of other channels.

Click on save once you have created the Penalty Box.

Now when the encoder is started the respective Layout is assigned to the penalty box created. In this example, it is the first tile.

 

Please note, you can add more than one Source to more than one tile and customize your Penalty Box. In this example, one source is assigned to one destination tile keeping other tiles for static display.

Note: The penalty box will rotate sources in the display tiles if there aren’t enough display tiles to show all alarming sources (For example, 5 penalty boxes and 7 alarming sources).