Using Voltara Intelligence · Lesson 3 · field plant corporate admin

Alarms: from warning to work order

How to read an alarm's priority, which of the five buttons to press, and what the app does by itself when nobody presses anything.

By the end of this lesson you can triage your plant's alarm list: say how urgent each alarm is, pick the right action for it, and spot an alarm the app has quietly linked to the wrong job.

Warm-up, from memory: (1) What does the alarm chip in the top bar count? (Lesson 1) (2) A new job has critical priority. How many approval levels does it need before anyone can be assigned? (Lesson 2)

(1) Live priority 1 and priority 2 alarms on the plants you can see. Tap it to open them. (2) Three: plant, then corporate, then admin. That still applies to a job raised from an alarm.

Everything below was tried on 15 October 2026 in the training copy of the app, running the current code, with the same accounts as Lesson 2 (Sara the supervisor, Tariq the technician, Carla from corporate) and six made-up alarms at Aden Solar, one of them a stock alarm. Messages in quotation marks are the app's own words.The rules about who receives emails and Teams messages come from reading the app's code: the training copy sends no mail.

1 · Where alarms come from

An alarm is the app saying “something at this plant needs a person”. Most are raised automatically: rules that test plant data (the rules are listed in the Rule Master tab), messages from the plant's control system or the inverter maker's cloud, and checks on stock, certificates and the data feed itself. Admin and corporate users can also raise one by hand (Raise Manual Alarm, at the bottom of the page).

Every alarm belongs to one plant, and often to one asset. You see only your own plants' alarms, and you cannot act on anyone else's. When Tariq tried to acknowledge an alarm at Shabwa, the app refused: “Access denied: alarm belongs to another plant”.

Where: Live Ops → Alarm Management, first tab Alarm Center. Or tap the alarm chip in the top bar.

2 · Read the priority

Top of the Alarm Center: tabs, a red banner saying 3 critical alarms active, the closure discipline panel, and four priority tiles: P1 Critical 3, P2 High 2, P3 Medium 1, P4 Advisory 1, plus Resolved today 0. Quick filter buttons below. — The Alarm Center for Sara after the triage in this lesson. The tiles count *active* alarms only: both critical alarms had been acknowledged (one by the app itself), so the P1 tile reads 0. A zero P1 tile does not mean nothing critical is open; filter **Acknowledged** to see them.

The app works out an alarm's priority from two things: its severity (critical, warning or info) and its type (equipment health, safety, battery, performance, stock and so on). You cannot change it. What the app does about each priority is very different:

Priority	Which alarms	What the app does by itself
P1 Critical	Every critical alarm	Announces it at once (in-app bell, Teams, email). Raises or links a work order after 30 minutes. Chases it after an hour if nobody has acknowledged it. Details in section 5.
P2 High	Warnings about equipment health, safety or the battery	Nothing automatic. The tile says so: “no automatic escalation”.
P3 Medium	All other warnings (performance, stock, finance, system)	Nothing automatic either, even though its tile says “≤24 hour response”.
P4 Advisory	Information only	Nothing. Recorded for trends.

Only P1 has the app behind it P2, P3 and P4 wait for a person. If your team promises “P3 within 24 hours” (the printed guide does too), that is a team habit, not something the app enforces or reminds anyone about. Look at the P2 and P3 tiles at least once a shift.

3 · The five things you can do

The alarm feed table with columns Priority, Type, Alarm title, Plant, Asset, Threshold, Actual, Status, WO ref, Raised and Actions. Five active alarms at Aden Solar: two P1 critical, two P2 warning, one P4 info. Each row has Create WO, Ack, Resolve and Shelve buttons.

1Priority (P1 to P4) and severity.
2Threshold and actual: the limit the rule tests and the value that crossed it (here, tracker angle 12 degrees against the 48 it should be at).
3Status: active, acknowledged, resolved or suppressed.
4Create WO, or the number of the job already linked.
5Ack, plus a tick box for acknowledging several at once.
6Resolve.
7Shelve.
8This tracker alarm had been shelved minutes earlier. Nothing on the row shows it (see the warning below).
9A stock alarm has no Create WO, Ack or Resolve: it clears itself when the part is back in stock, so raise a purchase request instead (Lesson 7).

Button	What it means	Who	What the app did when we tried it
Ack (acknowledge)	“I own this.” Your name and the time go on the alarm, so nobody triages it twice. It stops the one-hour chase.	Everyone, own plant	“Alarm acknowledged”. A second press: “Alarm cannot be acknowledged (not active)”. On the stock alarm: “This clears itself once Inverter cooling fan 230 V is back in stock. Raise a purchase request for the part.”
Create WO	Raises a work order with the alarm's details filled in, links the two, and acknowledges the alarm in your name.	Site, plant, admin	Sara: WO-2026-1013 created. Carla (corporate) sees the button, but nothing is created. On a stock alarm the button is not there at all.
Resolve	“The condition has cleared.” The alarm leaves the active list.	Everyone, own plant	“Alarm resolved”. No note or proof is asked for; your name and the time are recorded.
Shelve	A temporary mute for a known problem: no more notifications until the time runs out. The alarm stays open.	Everyone, own plant	With no reason: “A reason is required to shelve an alarm.” For two weeks: “shelf duration may not exceed 7 days”. For 4 hours with a reason: “It stays open and will start notifying again by itself.”
Suppress	Removes the alarm from the active list permanently.	Admin only	Tariq: “Access denied: only an administrator may suppress an alarm.”

Three habits follow from these rules:

Acknowledge only what you will actually follow up. Pressing Ack just to quiet a critical alarm also stops the app from telling anyone more senior about it.
If the alarm needs work, raise the job from the alarm. Create WO acknowledges the alarm anyway, and keeps the link between the two. The button is still there after someone has acknowledged the alarm (filter Acknowledged to find it); the acknowledgement then moves to your name.
Resolve only when you have seen the condition clear. The app takes your word for it.

A shelved alarm looks the same as any other in the Alarm Center The shelf works (the alarm goes quiet and comes back on time), but the list on the computer shows no “Shelved” badge and no Un-shelve button. So whoever shelves an alarm should note it in the shift handover. This has been reported as a fault.

4 · Raise a work order from an alarm

The Create Work Order from Alarm window for alarm TRN-105 at Aden Solar. Auto-classified as Safety, Emergency, Critical, JHA required. Fields: title, discipline, work order type, priority, a red JHA panel with hazard tick boxes, estimated hours, scheduled date and an auto-generated description quoting the alarm.

1The app's suggestion: a safety alarm becomes an Emergency job, critical priority, with a JHA needed.
2You can change discipline, type and priority. Check them.
3JHA panel: tick the hazards you expect. The permit and JHA still have to be done before work starts.
4The description quotes the alarm (code, severity, asset, problem). Add what you know.
5Create Work Order: the job is created and the alarm is acknowledged in your name.

From here it is an ordinary work order (Lesson 2): it starts at created, needs its approvals before it can be assigned (three levels for critical priority), and gets its safety pack built automatically. In the alarm list, the row now shows the job number and its status instead of the Create WO button.

5 · What happens if nobody acts on a P1

A critical alarm nobody touches. Stock alarms, alarms with no plant, and alarms whose rule says they never need a job are left out of the 30-minute step.

We ran the 30-minute step in the training copy. It found one critical alarm with no job and linked it to a job that already existed:

Acknowledged alarms. Combiner box arc-fault alarm linked to WO-2026-1013, acknowledged by Sara Supervisor. INV-001 offline linked to WO-2026-1012, status Created, no acknowledger shown. PR below critical threshold linked to WO-A01-2026-1000. String current alarm acknowledged by Tariq Technician, still offering Create WO. — After the automatic run. Rows the app acknowledged itself show no “Ack:” name. Automatic jobs carry the plant's code in their number (WO-A01-…); jobs raised by people do not (WO-2026-…).

Check what a critical alarm was linked to “Inverter INV-001 offline” is critical, but the app linked it to WO-2026-1012, an existing low-priority job to replace a cracked display, simply because it is an open repair on the same inverter. The alarm now counts as acknowledged and covered, nobody is chased about it, and the job behind it is not about the fault and is not urgent. When a P1 row shows a job number you did not expect, open the job. If it does not cover the fault, raise a proper job from the Work Order Center and change the priority of the existing one if it now matters.

One more thing to know: because the 30-minute step marks the alarm acknowledged, the one-hour chase to senior people almost never happens for an alarm that gets a job. It is still the safety net for alarms that get no job at all, for example stock alarms.

6 · Practice

Which button?

Allowed or refused?

All nine were tried in the training copy on 15 October 2026.

Put the P1 timeline in order

From memory: (1) Why should you not press Ack just to quiet a critical alarm? (2) You acknowledged a string alarm this morning, and now you find it needs a repair. Where do you raise the job, and what changes on the alarm? (3) A P1 row shows WO-A01-2026-1000. What does the number tell you, and what should you check?

(1) Acknowledging stops the one-hour chase, so nobody more senior hears about it, and it says you own the alarm. (2) From the alarm itself: filter Acknowledged, find the row and press Create WO. The job is linked to the alarm, and the acknowledgement moves to your name. (3) The app raised it automatically (the plant code is in the number). Open it and check that it really covers the fault and has the right priority.

Your part, by role

You are	You do
field Technician	Acknowledge alarms you are dealing with. Create WO when you find work is needed. Resolve only what you have seen clear. Shelve known problems, with a reason, and say so at handover.
plant Supervisor, plant manager	Watch P1 and P2 every shift. Create WOs from alarms and approve them. Check what automatic jobs were linked to. Use the closure discipline panel to clear alarms whose jobs are done.
corporate	Watch the fleet's P1 count and the alarms ageing more than 7 days. You can acknowledge, resolve and shelve, but you cannot raise jobs.
admin	Everything above, plus Suppress (permanent) and maintaining the rules in Rule Master.

Do next (10 minutes), in the app Open Live Ops → Alarm Management at your plant. Filter Acknowledged and, for every P1, open the job in its WO REF column: is it about this fault, at the right priority? Then open the Rule Master tab and find the rule behind one alarm. (The printed User Guide chapter 6 is out of date: only P1 has any automatic response.)

Questions? Ask me in the chat, for example “who receives the Teams message for a P1 at my plant?” or “how is the PR alarm threshold set?”. Then try it: open the Alarm Center for your plant, filter Acknowledged, and check that every P1 job number really covers its alarm.

Reference: Alarm card · Glossary · Previous: Lesson 2 · Next: Lesson 4, Safety first