Designing SCADA Alarm Callouts That Actually Wake Someone Up
Remote notification is a delivery channel, not an alarm system. Picking which alarms page out, escalation timers that match humans, and proving delivery.
Articles
Practical SCADA notes
Field-oriented references for HMI/SCADA systems, industrial communication, alarms, tags, historians, and project delivery.
Rate-of-Change Alarms: Catch a Runaway Before the High-High Ever Trips
Designing rate-of-rise and rate-of-fall alarms: window length, noise filtering, units, and the quality gating that stops them screaming on comms recovery.
Why Your Standby Pump Didn't Start: Getting Lead/Lag/Standby Rotation Right
Building lead/lag/standby pump rotation so duty sharing, standby failover and role swaps stay predictable — and visible to the operator at 3am.
Newest-First Alarm Summaries Hide the Critical Alarm During a Flood
During a flood a newest-first summary pushes the critical alarm off screen, and a filter left on erases it. Picking a default sort that holds.
Alarm Horn Silence Is Not Acknowledgement — Split the Buttons
Wiring horn silence to the acknowledge tag corrupts the event log from day one. Splitting silence, acknowledge, reset and shelve under ISA-18.2.
Why Every Alarm Ends Up High Priority, and How to Rank Them by Response Time Instead
Building an alarm priority matrix that ranks by consequence and operator response time, with the EEMUA 191 targets that keep high priority rare.
Acknowledged Isn't Cleared: How to Run a Standing Alarm Review
Standing alarms are acknowledged but still active. Reviewing them against the ISA-18.2 stale-alarm metric before they become summary wallpaper.
Common SCADA Alarm Design Mistakes
Practical alarm design mistakes that create nuisance alarms, floods, operator confusion, and poor incident response.