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Limits

Know these before you rely on Arifa for alarms.

SMS is best effort​

Arifa reports that Africa's Talking accepted a message, not that it reached the phone. Delivery to the handset is not confirmed. The SMS log in the Africa's Talking dashboard shows what was delivered.

After a temporary failure, Arifa retries once. After a permanent failure, such as an opted-out number, it does not retry. When a send fails in the end, Arifa logs the reason and reports the notification to Ignition as failed.

Codes are kept in memory only​

Reply codes are held in the gateway's memory. After a gateway restart, or a failover to a backup gateway, replies to earlier messages are ignored, and those alarms must be acknowledged in Ignition. Keeping codes in memory means there is no stored list of codes to protect.

Africa's Talking only​

Africa's Talking is the only SMS provider Arifa works with today.

Acknowledgement by reply on a live shortcode​

Acknowledgement by reply has been tested against Africa's Talking's sandbox. It has not yet been tested on a live shortcode.

Profiles are not migrated between 8.1 and 8.3​

An Arifa profile saved on an 8.1 gateway is not carried over when the gateway is upgraded to 8.3. Install the 8.3 module and create the profile again. See Upgrading from 8.1 to 8.3.

Other limits​

  • SMS is not encrypted end to end. Alarm text and reply codes cross the carrier network.
  • Each message is cut to at most 2 SMS.
  • The hourly SMS cap protects the balance, but a cap that is too low can also stop real alarms during a flood. Size it for a bad day.