Device alarm status

Who it’s for

Operators watching one critical machine ask “is this machine in alarm right now, and has anyone acknowledged it?” An alarms table answers “what happened” across a whole plant, but reading it for one machine means scanning rows. This card answers the narrower question directly, and a row of them — one per machine — reads like a status board from across the room.

What it does

A conveyor motor’s Critical overheat alarm has been open for 3 hours and 12 minutes. The whole card tints red, the figure reads 3 h 12 m and keeps counting, and the status line reads “In alarm · not acknowledged” until someone clicks Ack.

• The whole card takes the severity color — chip, text, and buttons — so a row of these is legible without reading a single word
• The figure is time in alarm, not time since it was raised — it runs while the alarm is open and freezes the moment it clears, so a cleared alarm shows how long the incident lasted
• Six ways to render the time, from 1 h 19 m to a running clock format to just the moment it started
• Acknowledge and clear from the card itself, each button disappearing once its job is done
• Always queries all of time, so an alarm raised days ago and still open stays visible no matter what the dashboard’s own time window is set to
• Browses every alarm the filter matched, with arrows and a position counter, and remembers which one you’re looking at across updates
• Shows one alarm at a time; point it at a single entity, and pair it with an alarms table for “what’s going on across the whole plant”

How to set up

Data keys

This is an alarm-type widget for one entity: it reads whole alarm objects, not telemetry or attribute keys, so there’s no data key to bind. The card reads the alarm’s type, severity, status, when it was raised, and when it was acknowledged and cleared. A severity the platform doesn’t define reads as Indeterminate instead of breaking.

Alarm source

Setting	Default	Effect
Alarm source	—	One entity and a filter — severity, status, type, propagation, assignee — configured in the widget’s own Alarm source section, the same as any alarm widget. The filter passes to the query unchanged; “assigned to current user” resolves to the signed-in user
Which alarm to show	Most severe, then most recent	Most severe suits an overview tile; Most recent suits a feed-style dashboard where the newest event matters more than its level
Alarms to fetch before choosing one	50	Only sets how many candidates are considered and counted — one is still displayed. Raise it only if a single entity can hold hundreds of simultaneous alarms

How to customize

Alarm display

• To hide the status line (“in alarm · not acknowledged”) — turn off Show the status line.
• To hide which entity raised it — turn off Show which entity raised it (printed in the top right corner by default).
• To change how the duration reads — set How the time reads: compact, short, words, largest-unit-only, a running clock, or the moment it started.
• To let people step through every matching alarm — turn on Let viewers step through the matching alarms; arrows and a position counter appear once the filter matches more than one, and the card remembers which alarm you’re looking at across updates.
• To mention the alarms not shown — turn on Say when there are more alarms; alarms of the same severity are counted separately from the rest.
• To change the empty-state message — edit Text shown when nothing matches.

Actions

• To hide the Acknowledge or Clear button — turn off Acknowledge button or Clear button. Each hides itself automatically anyway once its job is done.
• To relabel a button — edit Acknowledge button text or Clear button text; keep them short so they fit beside the status line on a small card.

Appearance

• To match a light dashboard instead of a dark one — set Colour scheme; it decides whether the severity tint leans toward black or toward white.
• To hide the severity chip — turn off Show the severity chip.
• To scale text with the card’s size — turn on Scale the text with the card size; off, the default, keeps identical proportions on every card no matter its size.

Fonts

• To match your dashboard’s fonts — set Big figure font, Alarm type font, Status line font, Entity name font, Severity chip font, and Button font. Leave a size empty to keep the built-in proportion.

Severity colours

• To use your own severity palette — set Critical, Major, Minor, Warning, and Indeterminate. Each one color drives the whole card — background, chip, text, and buttons are all derived from it.

How browsing behaves when alarms change

The list is re-sorted every time new data arrives, so a raw position number by itself would slide you onto a different alarm. The card avoids that: it stays on the alarm you’re reading, and only falls back to its normal pick logic — most severe then most recent, or most recent — once that alarm is acknowledged away or cleared out of the filter. Browsing always starts on the alarm the card would have shown anyway.

The “more alarms” count reflects the filter’s real total, so it stays honest even when more alarms match than Alarms to fetch before choosing one allows — in that case the severity breakdown is dropped, since the severities beyond the fetched page are unknown:

On the card	Means
Nothing shown	The alarm on screen is the only match
+1 more	One other alarm, of a different severity
+4 more warning	Four others, all at the severity on the chip
+3 more · 1 critical	Three others, one of them a different severity

Tips

• One card per critical machine, filtered to that machine’s alarms, reads better than one alarm table for the whole plant — a table answers “what happened,” this answers “is anything wrong right now.”
• Keep Show which entity raised it on: it’s the only thing that tells you which machine a card is about once several look alike.
• Point the click action at an alarm-details or machine-dashboard state — it receives the alarm’s originator, so the target can open on the right entity.
• If a card looks permanently dramatic, check the filter — it’s probably still matching cleared alarms.