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Introduction

AdvanceGuard® provides clear information to the operator when alarms are triggered. The precise nature of an alarm condition is determined by the rules that have been applied to each area.

There are three alarm lists:

Live Alarms: These are all security alarms which are currently active. These would typically be triggered in response to an incident that requires a response.

Pending Acknowledge Alarms: This is a list of alarms which have been cleared but are waiting for an operator to acknowledge them. Alarm acknowledgement is the primary mechanism in AdvanceGuard® for operators to label an alarm and provide any additional notes on the incident. Acknowledging alarms also provides an audit trail of actions taken by an operator.

This tab will only be available if Automatic Acknowledgement is disabled.

System Alarms: These are typically health and configuration alarms which are only raised if a problem has been detected with the overall operation of the system.

Contents

Arming an Area

Providing you have been granted permission to arm an area, there are two ways to arm or disarm an area.

Using the Selection Menu

  1. The Selection Menu is accessed by a Long Left Click on the PPI. on the area you wish to arm or disarm:

  2. The The Selection Menu will open on the PPI Map. Using the curser, you can select the option to disarm the area if it is armed or vice versa.

Using the Area Mini Control

  1. Select the desired area from the Configuration Tree; the selected Area Mini Control will open:

  2. It will display it’s status. In the above example it is Disarmed, so the following process will arm the area. Click the Disarmed button:

  3. This will open the Set Timeout options, allowing you to arm the Rules which govern that area, with immediate effect until it is manually disarmed, or for a selected timeframe which you can pick from the list. Once you have chosen the timeout, the area will have an Armed status, and an Entity Alarmed notification will be displayed for approximately 10 seconds:

  4. Now the area is Armed.

To disarm the area, you will need to follow the same steps as before, but this time you will need to click the Armed status instead. The Arm / Disarm button is only available on Alarm and General areas.

Live Alarms

When one or more tracks are in an Armed area and the Rule conditions are broken, the affected area(s) will go into alarm. Such instances will be reported to you in several ways:

Notification Banner: This will briefly appear at the top of the PPI Map as alarms are raised. These will subsequently be listed in the Notification Drop Down List.

Alarm Indicator: This line will flash across the top of the PPI Map. Red: Threat status/severity. Orange: Warning status/severity. 

Live Alarms: This will display the Live Alarms list.

An audible alert may be sounded if the system is configured to do so.

Live Alarms List

The Live Alarms list shows the following information and supports the listed actions:

🔴🔊: The severity of the alarm will be represented through a colour-coded circular icon. The colour of the alarm indicates the severity where red is Threat and orange is Warning. A speaker icon determines whether the alarm is audible.

ID: A unique code assigned to each alarm. 

Description: The type and location of the alarm.

Created: When the alarm first sounded.

Acknowledged: When the alarm was manually acknowledged by an operator.

Locate: The Locate icon is used for live alarms and focuses the PPI Display on the alarm location when selected.

Silence Alarm: This will silence the selected alarm. If more than one alarm is active this may not stop all alarm sounds. You will need to silence all alarms to achieve this.

Clear Alarm: This option will clear the alarm but in order for the alarm to not be immediately raised again if the incident is still in progress, this option will also suppress the alarm for the amount of time specified in the clear dialog.

Responding to Live Alarms

  1. When an alarm is listed in the Live Alarm panel, you can locate the alarm by clicking the Locate icon and it will flash an expanding red circle around the origin of the alarm, as in the example below:

  2. If a Rule has been configured to follow a target, this will also instruct the nearest camera to automatically track so that the cause of the alarm can be analysed.

  3. Alert Overview icons are optional, and will display the number of Live Alarms and System Alarms:

Clearing Alarms

If you want to clear an alarm:

  1. Click the Clear Alarm button. This will open the Clear Alarm panel.

  2. In order for the alarm to not be immediately raised again if the incident is still in progress, the option will also suppress the alarm for the amount of time specified. Select the duration from the drop down list:

  3. Then click OK.

The Clear Alarm option must be used with caution. It is not like a Clear in a traditional alarm management system. An alarm incident will be active for as along as the radar can detect the conditions required to trigger it. This can range from minutes to hours. For this reason the Clear Alarm will also suppress which means it will prevent any further alarms of the type being cleared to be raised for the specified time.

By default, alarms are set to Auto Acknowledge, and they are automatically acknowledged when cleared. Alarms are cleared after a set time period of the rule not being broken - in other words, the detected incident has finished.

This means that alarms are not transferred to the Pending Acknowledge Alarms tab in the Alarm Panel. However, system administrators may choose to switch to Manual Acknowledgement, where each alarm can be manually reviewed, even if it has been cleared. This ensures an operator is aware of every alarm flagged, even if they are not monitoring the software during the incident.

Pending Acknowledgement Alarms

The pending acknowledgement list shows all alarms which have been cleared but not acknowledged. This will be displayed providing that alarms are not set to Auto Acknowledge.

The pending alarm list supports the following actions:

Locate: Select Locate to automatically pan the map to show where the alarm was triggered.

Breaking Tracks: This will display all the tracks on the map that triggered or contributed to the alarm. Clicking on the Breaking Tracks icon will display all the tracks on the map that triggered or contributed to the alarm. Each track can be analysed in detail to examine exactly when and why the alarm was raised:

Silence Alarm: This will silence the selected alarm. If more than one alarm is active this may not stop all alarm sounds. You will need to silence all alarms to achieve this.

Acknowledge: This option will acknowledge the selected alarm, and, if configured, will prompt you to enter the acknowledgement details. Once complete the alarm will be removed from the list.

Clear Tracks: This will clear tracks any tracks that have been displayed using the Breaking Tracks option.

Alarm Acknowledge Details

Depending upon the configuration of the installation, it may be necessary for an operator to acknowledge alarms as they occur.

  1. Open the Pending Acknowledge Alarms section:

  2. This will open the Alarm Acknowledge Details window:

  3. Select a category for the alarm, e.g. Intruder.

  4. Enter notes about the alarm.

  5. Once you select OK the alarm is acknowledged and these details will saved against the alarm record.

Alarm categories are definable, so each site may use different options.

System Alarms

The System Alarms tab maintains a list of any issues that were encountered within the various modules that make up the system.

If a system alarm entry is not automatically cleared, you can manually clear an entry:

  1. Click on the red circle to the left of an alarm entry,

  2. Click OK in the resulting popup to confirm the action. Once cleared, an alarm for the same problem will only occur if the fault is resolved and is then freshly detected.

For more information about alarms please visit the AdvanceGuard® Alarm Panel page.

Alarm Dashboard

The purpose of the Alarm Dashboard is to give an overview of recent alarms at a glance, without having to utilise the Playback Queries and Reports function. Clear, interactive graphs present alarm data ordered by rule, area and time, as well as displaying System Alarms. 

Querying

To make an alarm query:

  1. Select the Time Period required. The default time period will be 24 hours, but a period of 48 or 72 hours can be selected.

The results are automatically calculated and will be presented in the four graphs below; a Rules bar graph, an Area bar graph, an Alarms by Time line graph and System Alarms line graph. In the example above, the alarm query is showing the last 24 hours.

By hovering the curser over a bar or a point on a graph, the system will display the value or that bar or point.

The example illustrated here tells us:

  • There have been 723 alarms in the past 24 hours.

  • Of those alarms, the Radar Area had the most - 369.

  • There was a spike in the frequency of all alarms at around 09:30 on the 2nd June.

Rules: The rules which have been broken. It is possible to adjust the alarm results displayed in the Alarms by Time line graph by 'deselecting' rules and areas, through clicking on their bars. This will remove that rule's alarm data from the accumulated data displayed in the line graph, and could be useful if a scale is skewed by a particular rule's alarm count being far higher than any other. A 'deselected' rule is indicated by changing from opaque to translucent blue.

If all of the rules are deselected then the Alarms By Time graph will show all of the alarms for the selected period.

Areas: This displays the areas where an alarm has been triggered. Again, it is possible to adjust the alarm results displayed in the Alarms by Time line graph by 'deselecting' rules and areas, through clicking on their bars:

Alarms by Time: This represents the spread of alarm frequency over time. There are two alarm line-graphs; Alarms by Time and System Alarms. Each represents the spread of alarm frequency over time. The default time period will be 24 hours, but a period of up to 72 hours can be selected. The numbering alarms per specific hour can be identified by hovering the cursor over the points of the line graph:

System Alarms: This represents the alarms caused by any system fault or failure over the time period selected (the default will be 24 hours).

Export

You can export the data by selecting the Export icon:

  • Should also cover alarm indicators on the alarm tabs (no detail on the alarms - just what the indicators mean)

  • Should also cover the alarm bell icon here even though its optional

Related Information

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Safety is everything.