Observation alarms are created as a result of an create observation alarm action in an observation monitoring definition. They are stored alongside the observations that triggered the observation monitoring action.

While the monitoring actions like Send Message can be used to inform users about the fact that there is an existing or approaching danger, observation alarms are the historical records of encountered alarm conditions. The Application Server also implements an alarm acknowledging mechanism that can be used to requests users to approve that an alarm was handled somehow.

An observation alarm is always linked to the observation it was created for and to the observation monitoring definition and action it was created from. Note that when you change an existing observation monitoring definition that already triggered alarms the new monitoring definition's condition might not have triggered the alarm, still the existing alarms are connected to the now modified observation monitoring definition. Deleting an observation monitoring definition will not delete the alarms triggered by that definition.

Table 1 lists all the data stored for an observation alarm, the data is partly created automatically by the Application Server and partly created based on the settings of the create observation alarm action in the observation monitoring definition.

Table 1: Data stored with observation alarms