Alarms and notifications

Two different things

An alarm is a rule that has fired. The alarms screen is the list of what needs, or has needed, somebody's attention.

Alarm and notification are two different things

The notification is the message sent out to you: an email in your inbox, a banner on your phone. It goes by; you read it or you don't.

The alarm is the row that stays in the tool. It does not go away because somebody read the email: it goes away when somebody states they have dealt with it. That is the difference between "I was told" and "it's sorted".

The four statuses

Open: nobody has picked it up yet. In progress: somebody has. Resolved: the problem is fixed. Closed: the file is shut, the row leaves the current list and joins the history.

An alarm is assigned to a person. With no name against it, an alarm is everybody's business and therefore nobody's, that is the most common way monitoring fails, and there is nothing technical about it.

Severity

Low, medium, high. It is not calculated: it is decided when you write the rule. At Les Ateliers du Vent d'Ouest, stopped extraction is high, that is safety. A drifting kiln is medium, that is money. A cold workshop is low, that is comfort, and a little quality.

Who gets what

Each rule names its recipients. Avoid writing the whole company in: three people who are told and who react beat thirty who assume somebody else is handling it. Yanis gets everything to do with the workshop, Camille the high alarms only, Farida the emails so she can keep the record. Tom gets nothing: he is learning, he is not on call.