An alarm queue nobody reads is not a safety system.
Every head-end ends the same way: four hundred active alarms, three of which matter, and an operator who has learned to scroll past all of them. The queue did not fail because the thresholds were wrong. It failed because a point out of range is not a sentence anyone can act on.
Raised against the equipment
An alarm belongs to the air handler, not to analog input 12. That means it arrives with the equipment’s type, its recent trend, the zones it serves and the last three interventions on it — the context an operator would otherwise assemble by hand before deciding whether to walk over.
Acknowledgement is part of the record
Who saw it, when, what they decided and why goes onto the same record as the alarm itself. Six months later the question is not whether anyone acknowledged it but what they knew at the time, and that is answerable.
Conditions you define, evaluated on their own clock
An alarm does not have to come from a controller. A monitor is a rule you define against the asset model — a metric compared to warning and alert thresholds, an external source such as weather, or a prompt run through the assistant — evaluated on its own interval and resolving to ok, warning, alert, no-data or error.
That means the alarms worth having are not limited to what someone configured in a controller a decade ago, and a rule that stops receiving data reports no-data rather than staying quietly green.
The recurring ones stop being new
An alarm that has fired nine times this year is shown as the ninth, with what closed the previous eight. A queue treats every occurrence as the first one; a record does not.
Specifics
- Raised on
- The asset, with its type, trend history and open work
- Carried
- Condition, severity, acknowledgement, actor and resolution
- Retained
- On the same record as trends, control actions and work history
Common questions
Can we keep our existing alarm priorities?
Yes. Existing alarm definitions, priorities and routing rules are read during the survey and carried across, so the cutover does not start with someone re-deciding four hundred thresholds.
Does this replace our safety alarms?
No. Indagate is not a safety-rated controller. Safety relays, interlocks and E-stops remain authoritative and operate whether or not Indagate is running.
Bring your point list.
The first conversation is a survey: what you run today, and what it would look like modelled.