System Model > Overview of Alarms | System Model

Alarms

An alarm indicates that an abnormal condition has occurred within your Citect SCADA system. For example, you can configure an alarm to notify you if a piece of hardware is not responding to input commands, or if a variable tag value has moved beyond a specified limit.

Alarms are a fundamental component of a control system, as they indicate to an operator that the system requires attention. When you configure your Citect SCADA system, you should confirm that alarms will be reported to an operator in a way that allows them to respond in an appropriate manner.

Citect SCADA supports two types of alarms:

Polling is used to monitor a system for the conditions that define an alarm. This process is evaluated by the alarm server, which generates an alarm whenever it detects the conditions that define an alarm.

When the alarm server generates an alarm, it is reported to an operator via the runtime interface. If your project is based on a Citect SCADA starter project, alarms are reported in the following ways:

For more information, see Viewing Alarms.

You can also add content to your graphics pages that are animated when specific alarm conditions occur (see Using Alarm Properties as Tags).

Information about alarms is provided in the following sections:

Published June 2018