Alarm and Event Severities

In Geo SCADA Expert, alarms and events are associated with a specific severity level (sometimes referred to as a priority). The severity level usually indicates the importance of the alarm.

The default severities are Critical, High, Medium, and Low. These form a range—Critical alarms are usually regarded as the most important and Low alarms are the least important. You can change the names of these severity ranges if required.

The default severity range meets the OPC Alarm and Events standard, with a range from 1-1000:

1. 1000 is Critical.
2. 667-999 is High.
3. 334-666 is Medium.
4. 1-333 is Low.
5. 0 is used to indicate no severity and is an extension defined by Schneider Electric. It is not part of the OPC standard.

You can change the severity range to suit the requirements of your system, for example, you can add new severities so that the entire range is divided into more than 5 severity ranges.

The severities that you define are available for selection when configuring alarm and event ranges for points.

We recommend that you add a separate Severity range, for example, if the points on your system are configured to raise an alarm whenever a change in a point's value results in the point reverting to its Normal state (see Return to Normal Alarm). By using a different color scheme for that Severity you help users to differentiate between these alarms (which indicate a point's transition back to its normal operating state) and alarms that indicate an abnormal condition.