Concepts

Tasks

Settings

Alarm Notification

You can have APM notify users whenever an indicator on an asset is outside of a normal range. Users can see indicator warnings and alarms in the Inspection Management view on the site.

As indicator readings are recorded, APM evaluates each one to determine if an alarm should be raised. When this happens, it is important that users be made aware that there has been a change in the condition of the equipment they are monitoring. Notification has three aspects:

•	Indicator notification: APM flags the indicator that has the alarm or warning

•	Asset notification: APM flags the asset that owns the indicator

•	Asset hierarchy notification: APM displays the alarm information in the asset hierarchy on the Inspection Management view

To prevent users from being inundated with non-critical warnings and alarms, you can set up a minimum alarm notification ranking. APM uses the alarm type and asset priority rankings to calculate the alarm notification ranking for each warning and alarm. This ranking tells APM when to push indicator warnings and alarms up to parent assets for display on the asset hierarchy. To do this:

•	Enter alarm types for the indicator states (for example, Warning, Alarm, and Critical). The alarm type describes the severity of the state of an indicator and ranks it numerically relative to the other states.

•	Enter numeric rankings for the consequence priorities you have set up

•	Enter a minimum alarm notification ranking

To calculate the minimum alarm notification ranking, APM multiplies the alarm type ranking by the asset priority ranking. Whenever this ranking is equal to or higher than the minimum alarm notification ranking, APM displays the alarm on the parent asset.

For example, you might have:

•	Alarm Types: Warning (1), Alarm (5), and Critical (10)

•	Asset Priority Rankings: Normal (1) and Critical (5)

•	Minimum Alarm Notification Ranking: (5)

A Warning on a Normal asset (alarm notification: 1 x 1 = 1) is not displayed on the parent asset or on any other asset that is higher in the hierarchy.

However, for a Warning on a Critical asset (alarm notification: 1 x 5 = 5), APM looks at the priority ranking of the parent asset and calculates the alarm notification ranking for that asset. If the parent asset is also a critical asset, APM displays the alarm on the parent asset and then calculates the alarm notification ranking for its parent in the hierarchy. When APM reaches a parent asset with an alarm notification ranking below the minimum ranking, the alarm will not be pushed any higher in the hierarchy.

To prevent alarms from being displayed in the top assets in the physical hierarchy, you can assign asset criticalities with low numeric rankings to those assets.

Warning: The ranking number assigned to consequence priorities is also used to calculate alarm notification rankings for indicator alarms. If you do not select a priority setting for an asset, alarm notifications might not be pushed up the hierarchy to be displayed on a parent asset. This can affect the display of the alarm in the site’s Inspection Management view.

You can acknowledge an indicator alarm by creating a new work order. Because the work type setting is mandatory on work orders, you must select a default work type for the system to use when creating alarm acknowledgment work orders.

To enter these settings, see Setting Acknowledgment Policies.