Alarms

Owned by Isabelle Avery (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jan 03, 2023 by Charlotte Dakin-Norris
5 min read

Introduction

This section covers the alarm lists and alarm management.

Witness has three alarm lists:

Live Alarms: These are all security or highway alarms which are currently active. This 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 the operator to acknowledge them. Alarm acknowledgement is the primary mechanism in Witness 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 the 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

Unlike most security and alarm management systems, Witness will auto-clear alarms. This is because the system has the unique ability to identify if the conditions that caused the alarm are still present. As soon as the conditions have cleared, for example someone leaving an alarm zone, then the alarm will be cleared after a configured timeout.

Live Alarms

Live alarms will appear in the Live Alarms list as they are triggered. The colour of the alarm indicates the severity where red is Threat, orange is Warning and green is Friend.

The alarm list supports the following actions:

Locate: Select locate to automatically pan the map to show the live incident.

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.

Note that the Clear alarm function can be controlled using Permissions so it can be added or removed from user roles - User Groups | Permissions.

The Clear 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 will also suppress which means it will prevent any further alarms of the type being cleared to be raised for the specified time. You should think of this as if you were disabling the rule for specified period of time.

As alarms are raised they will also generate a notification banner which appears at the top of the user interface.

These notifications will show for a short period before disappearing. All recent notifications can be seen in the Notification panel:

Depending on the rule configuration, the alarm may also trigger visual alarm animations on the map. For example an alarm zone may flash using the alarm severity as illustrated below:

When an alarm is cleared, a cleared Notification will be issued:

Alarm Acknowledgement

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, a user may choose to switch to Manual Acknowledgement, where each alarm can be manually reviewed, even if it has been cleared. This ensures a user is aware of every alarm flagged, even if they are not monitoring the software during the incident.

For Manual Acknowledgement, go to System Menu>Settings>System Settings>Alarm Options (System Settings | Alarm Options) and deselect Auto Acknowledge. There is also the option to force the operator to enter acknowledgement details to capture additional information about the alarm.

Pending Acknowledgement Alarms

The pending acknowledgement list shows all alarms which have been cleared but not acknowledged.

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. Each track can analysed in detail to examine exactly when and why the alarm was raised.

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

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

Alarm Acknowledgement Details

With Require Acknowledge Details enabled in Settings > System Settings > Alarm Options, the following dialog will be presented to the operator. They can:

  • Select a category for the alarm. Note that these are configurable within System Settings.

  • Enter notes about the alarm.

Once the operator selects OK the alarm is acknowledged and these details will saved against the alarm record.

Related Information

 

Safety is everything.