Hi Simon,

Italic means that it is not the most recent and up to date alarm record on that metric on that managed object.  In a DataMiner System, each time something happens to an alarm, this results in a new alarm record (e.g. the severity went from warning to critical, somebody acknowledged an alarm, somebody added a comment, etc.).  One alarm in DataMiner, from when it started to when it ended, can consist of multiple alarm messages.

You can easily see that also if you add a new alarm tab in your Alarm Console, and choose for Show history > Last hour (for example).  Then you will have a list of everything that happened in the last hour.  If the line item is in italic, it means that you will find a more recent line item for that same managed object and that metric (i.e. italic means that what you see is something that happened at that time, but in the meanwhile it has already evolved and there is a more recent update on that metric for that managed object).

If you go to the hamburger menu on the top left of your Alarm Console, there is an option History Tracking.  If you enable that, you will see no more italic items as these are moved below the most recent one (you can click that one open and see the history of events that led to the current status of the alarm, including changes in ownership, comments that were added, alarm severity that may have changed).

With history tracking enabled: