Defining Alarms

Alarms are used to define events for a thing.

Alarms are implemented as a state machine, where the events are defined as alarm states. For example, for a thing that represents a fuel tank, you could define an alarm for the fuel level and a states to indicate that the fuel level is low or high. For a thing that represents an engine, you could define an alarm to indicate whether the engine is on or off.

Things can have multiple alarms.

Alarms can be viewed in chart, graph, table and format.

Each alarm can have up to 99 states. Alarm states have a numeric alarm state value (assigned sequentially by the system), a text alarm state name, and a color (value) used when viewing the alarm on the thing details page in the Management Portal. The numeric alarm state value can only be viewed in the thing definition, but does not appear until after the thing definition is saved.

On the Developer page, click Thing definitions.
On the Thing Definitions page, click the Edit icon of the thing definition you want to modify.
On the thing definition editing page, select the Standard tab, and then select the Alarms tab.

Select Alarm definition, and then type or select the values for the new alarm definition.


Field	Description
Key	A unique identifier for the alarm that is globally unique within the organization. The valid characters for a key are letters, numbers, underscore, and hyphen.
Name	The name of the alarm definition that is displayed on Management Portal pages.
View security tags	Type or select any number of tags to the alarm that control whether a user or application can view the alarm. The user or application must have a role that has the same view security tag associated with it to view an alarm with a view security tag associated with it.
Update security tags	Type or select any number of tags to the attribute that control whether a user or application can update the alarm. The user or application must have a role that has the same update security tag associated with it to update an alarm with an update security tag associated with it.

Click New alarm state and type or select the fields for the new alarm state.


Field	Description
Name	The name of the alarm state.
Color	The color selection for the alarm state. Type the hexadecimal value or click inside the text box and a color selector appears.

Repeat steps 4 through 5 as needed to define new alarms.
When you finish, click Add.