Non-covered alarms

Non-covered alarms refer to alarms related to an area that you have not currently selected for control. This may occur during times when fewer Controllers are on duty, such as during the night shift. Any or all computers can be configured to receive non-covered alarms.

"Non-covered" does not apply to system alarms. This is controlled by a separate configuration setting, the Receive System Alarms checkbox, which can be found in the Network Management Console (NMC). If a database record has no value in its group field, it is considered as not belonging to any area and is treated the same as a system alarm. These types of database records will be received, or not received, by an easy eXtended Operator Station (ezXOS) station depending on that station's Receive System Alarms setting. They will never be considered non-covered alarms.

If a database record goes into alarm and no Controller is currently controlling the area(s) that record exists in, it is considered a non-covered alarm, and all ezXOS stations that have Receive System Alarms configured will see it. As soon as a Controller selects that control area, the alarm is no longer non-covered, and it will be removed from all ezXOS stations except for the Controllers who selected that control area.

The following should be considered with non-covered records:

• Database records can belong to groups, and a group can belong to any number of areas. Be wary that if the group belongs to Area 1, and no Controller is controlling Area 1, the group may also belong to Area 2, and if there is a Controller controlling Area 2, the alarm is not considered non-covered.

• In the Area Row Edit dialog box, you can Enable Alarm Cover Checking. If the area is not configured to perform cover checking, any non-covered alarms from that area will not be reported as non-covered. A record will only be reported as non-covered if the record is in a group that is in an area that has alarm cover checking enabled and no Controller is controlling the areas enabled for alarm cover checking. It is highly recommended that you check the area records’ settings and see if alarm cover checking is enabled.

• Toggling control areas on or off may take up to 1 minute to take effect. Despite the fact that you can configure a Check-in Timeout (sec) for area records that defines how often cover checking occurs, the check for covered or non-covered alarms has been hard-coded to occur about once a minute. Therefore, when control areas are updated, it may take up to 1 minute before an alarm shows up as non-covered or has its non-covered status removed.

When alarms are being generated for an area that is controlled by a Controller, non-covered alarms from another area occur only if alarm cover checking is enabled. If alarm cover checking is disabled, the system will not generate non-covered alarms.

Note: If a Controller receives a non-covered alarm, they do not automatically have the authority to acknowledge it or to control the necessary devices in that area. First, they must be able to select the area with the non-covered alarm for control, which can only occur if the computer rights and/or Controller rights allow it. At any given time, therefore, at least one Controller should have rights to control each area.