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Nuisance alarms - those minor, unimportant status alarms that require no corrective action - can defeat the entire purpose of your alarm monitoring system.
Your alarm system is supposed to tell you about unusual events: equipment problems, dangerous environmental conditions, power failures and so on. These are the events you need to know about so you can take action to correct them.
And when nothing unusual is happening, your alarm system should stay quiet.
So what happens when your alarm system constantly bombards your monitoring staff with nuisance alarms? Your staff becomes desensitized to alarm reports, and they start to unconsciously assume that all alarms are just minor nuisances.
Inevitably, sooner or later, your staff will not respond to a critical alarm, and a serious problem will go undetected and uncorrected - potentially causing thousands of dollars of equipment damage or possibly even a service outage.
But your alarm monitoring system doesn't have to play the boy who cried wolf. T/Mon SLIM provides effective tools to filter out nuisance alarms. T/Mon SLIM frees you to focus your efforts on serious threats, giving your network a better level of protection.
Some alarms you really don't need to see at all. If an alarm is simply a status indication and never requires any action, you can just turn it off in the T/Mon database by setting it to "No Log."
This doesn't actually deactivate the alarm - T/Mon still receives and records the alarm input - you just don't have to see it. The alarm is still recorded in your T/Mon history file, so you can retrieve all alarm events associated with that alarm point, if it's necessary for data analysis.
Some alarms fade in and out or mysteriously activate and clear, apparently correcting themselves almost as soon as they occur. Power fades, fluctuations, spikes and failures often spontaneously appear and disappear.
You can filter out self-correcting alarms through T/Mon SLIM's alarm qualification time feature. There's two ways to qualify an alarm
Some alarms shouldn't be left to automatic filtering, but you still need to temporarily quiet them. These are alarms that you need to be alerted about when they happen, but they go in and out of alarm, creating a cascade of nuisance alarms.
T/Mon lets you temporarily silence these alarms with its Alarm Tagging and Silencing feature. Tagging and silencing are slightly different:
T/Mon's most powerful nuisance alarm fighter is the Derived Alarms feature. With Derived Alarms, T/Mon users can create custom alarms based on multiple alarm inputs and date/time factors. You can specify exactly when - and under what circumstances - alarms should be hidden and when they should be displayed.
Here's an example of how you can use Derived Alarms to control nuisance alarms. Let's suppose you monitor an open door alarm at a busy facility. You need to know if the door is left open, or if there's a security breach after hours. But technicians go in and out of the building all day, creating an endless series of momentary alarms.
With T/Mon, you can create a Derived Alarm that specifies three conditions:
Read this free White Paper and find out if T/Mon SLIM is right for you
Get more information about T/Mon SLIM, the regional alarm monitoring solution you control. This free White Paper, "How to Build a NOC Without Destroying Your Budget" will help you determine if T/Mon SLIM Is the right solution for your network. Download this White Paper now to get more information about T/Mon SLIM.
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