Alarms

• When an alarm is created, it is linked to an equipment or to a property of an equipment. The alarm will be triggered if the pre-established conditions are met

• When the alarm is raised, it will create an alert

• Alerts have a status and a severity. The status can be: open, acknowledged, or closed. The severity can be: standard or critical.

• Alarms also have a status and a severity. Most of the time, the status and the severity of the alarm will match the status and the severity of the last alert triggered by the alarm

Only users with the Admin, Integrator or Site Manager roles can create alarms while the other roles can see the alarms but can not edit them.

 

Create an alarm

1. Select the Box for which you want to create the alarm and click on Alarms

2. Click on "Configuration"

3. Click on the button “Add an Alarm”

On the “New Alarm” panel that appears

1. Give the alarm a name. It is a good practice to choose an explicit name as it will be used in the email notification/

1. If the connection is lost with an equipment, option “Equipment status”

2. If the value of a property meets some specific criteria, option “Property value”

To trigger an alarm based on the status of the equipment select the equipment in the list.
The alarm will trigger if the connection is lost with the equipment. 

For equipment that connects to the Box in LoRaWAN, the connection will be considered as lost if
no values have been received from the device in the last 24 hours.

For equipment that connects to the Box through a wired protocol (BACnet, ModBus…), the connection will be considered as lost if there are less values received than expected in the last hour for a given equipment. The number of expected values being calculated automatically by Wattsense.

To trigger an alarm based on the value of a property, select the property and detail the condition.
Different conditions are available:

• The value is in a range. The range is defined by a min threshold and a max threshold. If the value is in between (> and <),
  the condition is met and the alarm is raised

• The value is outside a range. The range is defined by a min threshold and a max threshold.
  If the value is outside the two thresholds, the condition is met and the alarm is raised

• The value is in a set. Enter any value in the field and type comma “,” to add it.
  If the value of the property is equal to one of the values of the set, the condition is met and the alarm is raised

• The value is either True or False. If set to True, the alarm will trigger if the value of the property is equal to True
  and vice versa

If you don’t want to create an alert immediately after the first time the condition is met, you can specify
the “number of occurrences to trigger an alert”. This option is only available for alarms based on the value of a property.

If you want more than one occurrence to happen, you are then asked to specify the time period within which the different occurrences should happen. For example: if the condition for the property T°C to raise an alarm is to be outside a range between 19°C and 23°C, and to meet this condition at least 5 times in the last hour; then the number of occurrences should be set to 5 within 1 hour.

Please keep in mind that for wired protocols, the values of the property are refreshed every 10 minutes. On the other hand, with the LoRaWAN protocol, the frequency will depend on the configuration of each sensor. Next, you can specify the severity of the alarm. By default it is set to “standard” meaning that when the alarm is raised, its severity will be set to “standard”. And the alerts generated each time the alarm is triggered will have the same severity. You will be able to edit the severity of the alarm and its alerts on a different page where the different alerts are displayed per alarm.

The severity can allow you to isolate events for which a technician should go on site to fix the underlying issue from the other events.

Please note that the status of the alarm when it triggers and the status of the alert it created are set to “open”.

When the alarm triggers and an alert is created, a notification can be sent to as many recipients as you would like either by text message or by email. The details of an alarm and the different alerts it has generated are available in the console, but it can be useful to send a notification to external users to trigger an intervention onsite to fix the issue.

The recipients can be inside your organization or outside (external). If you select an external recipient, you will be asked for their name and the media to use to send the notification (email or SMS).

For recipients inside the organization the language of the notification message will be the same as the language selected by the recipient when using the console. If he or she didn’t set a preference or for external recipients, the language of the notification message will be the same used by the user in the console when the alarm is created.  Similarly, the mobile number of a user inside the organization is inherited from his or her profile.

• For Email and SMS: space the notifications 24 hours apart. This way even if several alerts are created during the same day, only one notification is sent. If an alert is created after more than 24 hours, a new notification will be sent.

• For Email only: receive one notification per week. This way even if several alerts are created during the same week, only one notification is sent. If an alert is created after the seventh day a new notification will be sent.

After submitting the form, the alarm is then created and Wattsense will automatically monitor the different equipment to decide whether or not to trigger the alarm.