Alarms in iControl > Key Concepts > Alarm Attributes
 

Alarm Attributes

 
General Guidelines for Alarm Attributes
Several fields comprise the Alarm Properties window (to which you can navigate by double-clicking an alarm in the Alarm Browser). Together, the values these fields hold define the alarm.
 

The following table describes these attributes and their respective guidelines:
 
Attributes of an alarm  
Attribute
Description
Name
A meaningful name for the alarm.
The alarm name appears in the GSM Alarm Browser tree and several other locations. By convention, the name uses Sentence case (as opposed to, for example, Title Case or even ALL CAPS).
URI
A unique identifier for the alarm.
This is what uniquely identifies an alarm. Everything else could, potentially, change over time, but if you change URI, then you have, by definition, created a new alarm. Consequently, alarms with the same URI but coming from different GSMs are considered to be the same and interchangeable. This is useful and efficient in terms of scalability and redundancy when coupled with tools such as the GSM Aggregator.
Path
Tree path of the alarm1.
Device URI
A unique identifier for the (hardware) device providing the alarm.
The device URI is used to group together alarms that pertain to the same device. Typically, one device handles one channel or signal. This attribute allows us to see all alarms related to a given channel or signal as well. The GSM contextual log viewer uses the Device URI to find alarms related to one another. Perhaps more importantly, a number of metadata fields are attached to each GSM device using this field as a key. This should influence the way device URIs are built so that for devices with multiple ports (usually sources), their URIs should include an indication of the port number, so each source gets its own source metadata and the alarms are grouped by source.
• Separate the various parts of the URI with a forward slash (/)2. This allow us to have relative URIs.
• Device URIs and Long IDs should be the same. In the past, long IDs were sometimes allowed to contain spaces, which is forbidden in URIs, so they need to be encoded "just in case". Some URIs are derived from long IDs, but with only selected parts encoded.
Device class
Device model name. Typically, this is product marketing name; for instance, for the Densité line this would be something like DEC-1002. iControl doesn't use this in any particular fashion, but occasionally users will use this field when searching the logs to identify problems across a product family. For instance, if you see a specific problem with an XVP-3901 you might search for similar problems with other XVP-3901's, and not jsut the one where you noticed the problem -- "do I experience audio losses on all my XVPs?".
1 Multiple paths for same alarms are not supported. The last specified path will be used. By convention, each segment of the path uses Sentence case, as opposed to for example Title Case or even ALL CAPS.

2 Legacy Densite/Imaging URIs use the _ character, however.