A colleague from the operations team here has asked if there's a way to mask an alarm, if the alarm is not active at the time. The context is that under certain conditions for an element, some parameters produce very short duration alarms. They are not active for long enough to be masked in the normal way. They tell me that using a temporary alarm template with hysteresis set for the parameter is not an option and I think you can only mask an element when there are no alarms active.... Is there any other way of 'pre-masking' an alarm?
Pre-masking an alarm is not possible. You can only mask an element at any time, and all alarms on that element will subsequently get masked automatically.
I guess you could try to use the correlation engine also, but that would be reactive, i.e. the alarm would occur, the correlation rule would go off and mask the alarm subsequently. But in that case by the time that happens, for the sound of it, the alarm will also be cleared already again.
Do you know what the exact nature of the use case is? So this is a situation where under specific circumstances specific alarms are expected, and they want those to not appear in the active alarm list? Is this related to planned maintenance or so? Would be great to understand the background of this.
Ok, gotcha, that makes sense. And I assume they do not want to mask the IRDs entirely, because alarms on other metrics are still relevant. And in that case there isn’t an off the shelf solution, i.e. one cannot mask a metric when it is not in alarm (i.e. you have to effectively have an alarm to mask that one alarm).
The only alternative I could come up with so far would be to change the alarm template indeed. This could be viable if this is really always about this specific use case (i.e. these IRDs and that Lock metric). In that case you could easily make a second alarm template where for example that Lock status metric is no longer monitored, or has a hysteresis on it to prevent quick toggling. You could then add a button on the IRD view, linked to a small automation script that basically switches the alarm template on those IRDs (you could also do it so that it does it for x amount of time and then automatically returns after that, so people cannot forget). In that case, when the operators are in such as situation they could push that button. Of course if this would happen frequently on all sorts of metrics, this solution would not be feasible.
Thank you for your suggestion Ben, I’ve forwarded it to the team and asked them to comment. We could certainly add the button if they think it would help. I’ll let you know what feedback I have from them….
Hello Ben – thank you for responding. The situation was that an unforeseen problem with the uplink was causing several monitoring IRDs at control room site to frequently lose lock for short durations, each generating an alarm in Dataminer. The staff wanted to know if these alarms could be temporarily masked before they occur, in the same way as an active alarm. The difficulty is they are too short in duration for the mask to be set. Preparing and activating a new alarm template or any other similar action would be too much to do while trying to resolve the uplink problem. They are hoping a quicker or easier method exists…