“Did you know” is a weekly-ish post covering features that are available to all, but sometimes not easy to find on your own.
Note: Please do not use these posts as a channel to request new features… even if the ask is related to the tip! We do want to hear what you think, but go ahead and start a new topic for it.
Did you know that you can have SGPro send external notifications (info, warnings, errors, alerts) to your phone (or any other device really)?
SGPro has it’s own internal notifications (soon to be the notification center). These notifications are great when your at the machine, but when you’re not, it’s great to keep an eye on everything from your phone.
To do this, head over to the Tools -> Configure Notifications menu option. Once you click it, this will appear:
As of this posting, SGPro supports three different types of external notifications (called endpoints). While we may add more in the future these three can typically meet your needs. The most widely used is the email endpoint. With it, you can send yourself emails about the status of your running sequence. Each email is neatly formatted and contains all the information you need to determine the health of your gear (and sequence). The great thing about email is that it can almost always be repurposed to send SMS (Text) Messages. Almost every mobile carrier will give your phone its own email address. Typically your number followed by the carriers domain. Example (in the US):
5123456789@verizon.something.net
The other two can also be useful in different ways… The File Endpoint allows you to create a concise, user friendly log file of sorts. Reviewing it can give you much insight as to what happened during sequence execution. It is MUCH friendlier and MUCH easier to read than the developer log file we use for debugging and troubleshooting.
Finally, Good Night System is software from Lunatic Astro. For a very reasonable cost you can add some peace of mind to your nights via the GNS application suite. If something goes awry, SGPro will ask GNS to sound a very loud alarm… something that email and text messages cannot do.
Further detail and documentation can be found here:
http://www.mainsequencesoftware.com/Content/SGPHelp/NotificationSystem.html