Categorize Alarms

System Model > Alarms > Manage Alarms > Categorize Alarms

Alarm categories allow you to group the alarms in your Citect SCADA system. They are a key part of an alarm management strategy, as the priorities that are applied to alarms are implemented through the alarm categories you create (see Prioritize Alarms).

When you create an alarm category, you can define the following settings for all the alarms that are added to the category:

The priority applied to an alarm
The font that is used when an alarm displays
The formatting that is used when an alarm displays
The action that is triggered (via a Cicode expression) when an alarm reaches a specified status (on, off or acknowledged)
The logging that occurs for an alarm.

Alarms can also be filtered and sorted based on their category.

A Citect SCADA project can support up to 16376 alarm categories. Each individual alarm category is represented by a numeric value. There are three special cases:

Category 0 is reserved as a default category
Category 254 is reserved for user-created alarm summary entries
Category 255 is reserved for hardware alarms.

You can also create a label to refer to an alarm category. This allows you use a meaningful name to identify the category instead of a numeric value. When you define a label for an alarm category, the label's Expression field should include the numeric value associated with the category you would like the label to represent. For more information, see Define a Label.