Alarm consumer actions can be either specific to an individual alarm, or global.

Global actions are associated with, and can be triggered by, every alarm in the system. For example, the SQL event log plug-in is normally used to create a global action that causes every alarm event to be logged to a database on the Application Server. When new alarms are added, any global actions in effect will apply to them as well.

Specific actions can apply to one or several alarms. For example, you can apply a Send e‑mail action to the Disk used space (%) alarm, so when that alarm is triggered, an e‑mail is sent automatically to a system administrator. The same action could similarly be applied to a range of health monitoring alarms, with an e‑mail being sent if any of them is triggered.

Alarm consumers (actions) are created via the GSM Alarm Browser window. They can also be created by scripts using the addAction() function.