Alarm Health: ISA-18.2 Alarm Analysis for Ignition

What it finds

Six kinds of alarm problem

Each finding comes from an analyzer on the gateway, with default thresholds you can change per playbook.

Problem	Flagged when	Proposed change
Chattering	3 or more activations within 60 seconds	A 15-second clear delay, plus a 2 % deadband on a setpoint alarm whose deadband is smaller
Fleeting	At least half of 5 or more occurrences clear in under 5 seconds	A 5-second clear delay
Stale	Still active at the end of the window, for longer than 24 hours	Reviewed by your team
Duplicate	Two alarms on the same equipment activate within 2 seconds of each other on 80 % of occurrences	Reviewed by your team
Priority	The low, medium and high split is 15 points or more away from 80, 15 and 5 percent	Reviewed by your team
Flood and rate	More than 10 alarms in a 10-minute period, or more than 6 an hour on average	Reviewed by your team

What each one looks like

On a real floor

Chattering: a sump high-level alarm that fires 3 to 5 times a minute every time the pump cycles, 412 activations a week, acknowledged by reflex.
Fleeting: a PLC communication alarm that clears itself in under 5 seconds, 80 times a day, so the one time it stays on nobody looks.
Stale: a bypassed conveyor E-stop alarm active since June, three months on the top of the list, that every operator scrolls past.
Duplicate: the tank HiHi and the overflow interlock, 2 seconds apart every single time, so one event always costs two acknowledgements.
Priority: 68 % of configured alarms set to High, which means High tells an operator nothing about what to do first.
Flood: a 2-second power dip at 3 am raising 140 alarms in a minute, with the one that mattered, a chiller lockout, buried in the middle.

Each of these is a finding with the journal rows behind it and, where Ignition has a property for it, the change written in that property’s name. The scenarios are illustrative.

Fixes that respect your UDTs

The change goes where the alarm is defined

When an instance inherits the alarm from a UDT type, Artekis proposes the change on the type and states its reach: how many instances inherit the alarm, how many are in this area, and how many show the problem, with examples. Your templates stay templates. When a setpoint comes from a UDT parameter, the proposed deadband follows each instance’s own setpoint.

Your engineers decide

Findings are recommendations

Each finding opens with its evidence and proposed change. Your engineers record a verdict: confirm, known issue, dismiss, or wrong. Nothing is applied by Artekis. After your team applies a change, the next run shows whether the problem cleared, and the finding resolves itself when it has.

The KPIs

The numbers behind every run

Every run also builds a KPI document before the model is called, so the figures come from the journal, not from the model.

Rates against the ISA-18.2 benchmarks: alarms per hour, per day and per 10 minutes, the peak 10 minutes, and time in flood
Distribution: priority split, the top 10 alarms’ share, and chattering, fleeting, stale and duplicate counts
Where and when: counts per plant area and, when you give shift start times, per shift and the alarms standing at each shift change
Week over week: each run compared with the previous run of the same window

The KPIs feed the Alarm KPIs view in Perspective and an 8-page PDF report rendered by the Reporting module in about a second, ready to schedule to your team.

Questions

Common questions

How often should Alarm Health run?+

Weekly is typical, over a 7-day window. It can also run on demand, or over a longer window such as 30 or 180 days when you first install it.

Will it change our alarm configuration?+

No. It proposes the change, in Ignition’s own property names, and your team applies it under your change control. A re-run after the change shows whether the finding cleared.

What does it need?+

An alarm journal profile holding the alarms you want analyzed, and a context model naming the plant area’s alarms. The PDF report also needs the Reporting module.

An ISA-18.2 review of your alarms, with the fix for each one.