An alarm entity informs users of a situation that requires immediate attention and provides details on how it can be handled in Security Center. For example, an alarm can indicate which entities (usually cameras and doors) best describe the situation, who must be notified, how it must be displayed to the user, and so on.
- Name
- Alarm name.
- Priority
- Priority of the alarm (1-255), based on the urgency of the situation. Higher-priority alarms are displayed first in Security Desk.
- Recipients
- Users, user groups, and analog monitor groups who are notified when the alarm occur. Recipients are responsible for responding to the alarm situation.
- Broadcast mode
- How the alarm recipients are notified about the alarm.
- All at once
- All recipients are notified at the same time, immediately after the alarm is triggered.
- Sequential
- Each recipient is notified sequentially after a Forward delay that is calculated from the time the alarm is triggered. The maximum delay is 20 days, which is entered using seconds as the unit of measurement. If the recipient is a user group, all members of the group are notified at the same time.
- Attached entities
- Entities that help describe the alarm situation, such as cameras, areas, doors,
alarm procedures, and so on. When Security Desk receives an alarm, the attached
entities can be displayed sequentially or all at once in the canvas.
If a composite entity is attached to the alarm, the entities that compose it are also attached to the alarm. For example, if a door entity is attached to the alarm, the cameras associated to the door are also attached to the alarm.
Alarm priority
In Security Desk, alarms are displayed in the Alarm monitoring and Monitoring tasks by order of priority. Priority is evaluated every time a new alarm is received. The highest-priority alarm is displayed in tile 1, followed by the second-highest in tile 2, and so on. When two alarms have the same priority value, priority is given to the newest one.
When a new alarm is received in Security Desk with a priority level equal or higher than the current alarms displayed, it pushes the other alarms down the tile list.
When an alarm is acknowledged in Security Desk, it frees a tile for lower priority alarms to move up.
Video recording on alarms
If an alarm has cameras attached to it, you can verify that the video related to the alarm is recorded and available for future alarm investigations.
- Automatic video recording
- The duration of video, in seconds, that the Archiver records after the alarm is triggered. This option is set on the Advanced page of the alarm.
- Protect recorded video
- The number of days that the video related to an alarm is prevented from being deleted.
- Time to record before an event
- The duration of video, in seconds, that the Archiver records before the alarm was triggered, to make sure that whatever triggered the alarm is also recorded. This option is set for each camera in Camera default settings page of the Archiver role.