#36 Alarm Tag

Clayton Miller Sat 5 Nov 2011

I propose that alarm be added to the standard tag set. This tag is associated with any boolean point that draws attention to some threshold being reached. This would be a generalized tag similar in which tags similar to freezeStat would fit into.

Brian Frank Sat 5 Nov 2011

Is alarm a marker point, or a status condition? In oBIX we allowed any point to have a status condition that was fault, alarm, overridden, etc. Might be useful to have something like that in Haystack too.

Joel Bender Mon 7 Nov 2011

In BACnet "faults" are not restricted to boolean points (they are split out from alarm conditions into a "reliability" property) and cover a wide range of things that can go wrong, like OVER_RANGE, UNDER_RANGE, OPEN_LOOP, SHORTED_LOOP, COMMUNICATION_FAILURE, etc. Alarms are usually associated with some kind of condition, not just "status", and we have lots of sub-classifications of conditions, depending on how "smart" the program is that does the identification.

Brian Frank Mon 7 Nov 2011

Okay, maybe I misread the original email. When it comes to "alarming" there are really two issues:

  • the "status" of a given point
  • the actual alarm event itself

Both might deserve treatment by haystack. In my post I was merely referring to maybe we ought to model status like oBIX did (inAlarm, unackAlarm, overridden, etc).

Traditional alarm event modeling is really a whole another ball of wax. I do think the traditional models of alarm events could be simplified and made much more powerful thru the application of Haystack tags. Whether there is interest and value in that effort, I guess the community needs to decide.

Mohan Shelar Wed 16 Aug 2017

Hi Brian,

I would like you guys to revisit "alarm" tag. We are constantly monitoring many types of alarms in SkySparks but with custom tag "alarm". There are many examples of physical alarm condition or say virtual alarm condition. Alarm is alarm and we don't have a haystack tag.

Say, filter dirty alarm in AHUs - Physical alarm point(though it is a sensor)

Failed to start and failed to stop alarms for any equip(AHU, FCU, RTU, Chiller, Boiler) - These are virtual(Binary value in BMS)

Can you please think of having it in Haystack?

Denis OConnor Thu 22 Mar 2018

I have been using the alarm tag by itself for a while and now I see adding the tag status could add clarity when used in a combination like below:

  • heatPump refrig alarm status

I would be interested in any comments folks might have. Alarm may also be used as follows:

  • heatPump refrig alarm sp

This results in a suggestion of two new tags

  • alarm- tag used to indicate a point associated with an undesirable condition related to temperature, pressure, level, etc.
  • status- tag associated with a boolean point used to indicate an alarm is on/off, true/false, etc

Jose Gonzalez Diaz Wed 30 May 2018

I woulld prefer to use the tag "limit" for alams, to differentiate it from the sp, more associated with regulation. So, your examples would look:

heatPump refrig alarm status --> heatPump refrig alarm heatPump refrig alarm sp --> heatPump low limit

So, we are not using status, but we use limit with low/high

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