Alarm priorities

You assign a level of priority, or severity, to an alarm. A boiler temperature limit, for example, would require a high-priority alarm, requiring immediate attention. An end of a shift alarm is a much less severe. The alarm priority usually depends upon the circumstances—the factory application, the nature of the equipment, safety, availability of backup systems, potential costs of damage, or downtime.

You assign an alarm priority when you define a tag. The priority can range from 1 to 999, with 1 being the most severe.

You can designate a range of alarm priorities to represent a classification of alarms. For example, if a process requires four levels of severity, you can create four priority ranges.

Ranges are useful for alarm filtering. For example, you can configure an alarm display to filter out all but the critical alarms. You can create animation links, acknowledgment scripts, and filtered viewing and printing, all based on the alarm priority range.