Alarms

An alarm indicates that an abnormal condition has occurred within your Plant SCADA system. For example, you can configure an alarm to notify you if a piece of hardware is not responding to input commands, or if a variable tag value has moved beyond a specified limit.

Alarms are a fundamental component of a control system, as they indicate to an operator that the system requires attention. When you configure your Plant SCADA system, you should confirm that alarms will be reported to an operator in a way that allows them to respond in an appropriate manner.

Plant SCADA supports two types of alarms:

• Defined alarms

  Defined alarms are added to a project by a system engineer to report specific runtime conditions that require an operator’s attention. Each alarm is associated with one or more tags, depending on the type of alarm that has been configured.

  See Defined Alarm Types.

• Hardware alarms

  Plant SCADA regularly runs diagnostic routines to monitor the performance of internal operations associated with any connected peripheral equipment. If the system detects any abnormal conditions, such as an I/O device that is not responding to input commands, a hardware alarm is generated.

  See Hardware Alarms.

Plant SCADA monitors a system for the conditions that define an alarm. This is evaluated by an alarm server process, which generates an alarm whenever it detects the conditions that define an alarm.

When the alarm server generates an alarm, it is reported to an operator via the runtime interface. If your project is based on a Plant SCADA starter project, alarms are reported in the following ways:

• The three most recent alarms are displayed on the alarm banner

• Alarm lists and alarm counts are displayed on specific alarm pages

• A historical list of alarms and events is displayed on the Sequence of Events page (see Events).

For more information, see Viewing Alarms.

You can also add content to your graphics pages that are animated when specific alarm conditions occur (see Use Alarm Properties as Tags).

Information about alarms is provided in the following sections:

• Manage Alarms

• Configure Alarms

• Action Alarms at Runtime

• Archive the Alarms History

• Customize Alarm Pages.