Welcome to your guide on managing alarms effectively! At the heart of a robust security strategy, alarms are crucial for identifying and acting on security incidents or events that need your attention across your various locations. Think of an alarm as a call to action, requiring a prompt review and resolution, typically by a security professional like yourself. Common scenarios triggering alarms include:

Use the Rules Engine to set up an alarm and the Alarms tab to to take action on alarms assigned to you and your teammates. We will take you through the entire flow here: from setting up an alarm to reviewing and closing an alarm.

Getting started with alarms is straightforward. Head over to the Rules page and click the blue plus icon to create a new rule

Select an event to trigger the alarm and assign it to your team, along with clear action steps.

Before creating your Rules, please ensure that your Cloud Analytics or Axis AOA Scenarios are configured, or any IoT, HALO, or I/O devices are added to the system.

In this example rule, using the Axis AOA Scenario, when someone crosses the line and it goes into alarm, it will create an alarm and assign it to two Arcules users. This rule also happens to trigger recording on nearby cameras to ensure the alarm has a good picture of the events.

The alarm generated will look like this within the Arcules Portal:

Note: All alarms will initially be populated with the following:

You will notice that the Alarm gives you a viewing pane for the footage indexed at the time of the alarm, as well as the current live view from the camera. If the rule is configured to record additional cameras, those are added under the Related Items section. This is an important configuration option for when you are using environmental sensors or I/O devices to trigger the Alarm to ensure the video of the area is captured. Arcules makes sure this information is presented in a quick to reference, easy to review way.

To review an alarm, navigate to the Alarms Inbox by clicking on the alarm icon in the left navigation bar.

Once you have reached the Alarms Inbox, you should be able to see all the alarms that have been assigned to you, or your group(s). For instance, if you are in the Security Group as well as the Employees Group, you will be able to see all alarms from both groups in your inbox. This inbox is a team inbox so that you and your teammates can collaborate together to close alarms as effectively and efficiently as possible.

You can filter the inbox by status (i.e. Open, Unassigned, In Progress or Closed), and by time range (All, 24h, 3 days, 7 days and 30 days).
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Status Definitions:

To review the alarm, simply select the alarm of interest from the list on the left. You will then be able to view all the data associated to this alarm including a video clip of the incident occurring, in addition to a LIVE view of the camera device that triggered the alarm so that you can have eyes on both the incident and the current situation. 

To take charge of the alarm, click on the Assign To Me button.

This will change the Status to "In Progress" and the Assignee to your username.

It may be helpful to add a comment at the bottom indicating any further information gathered when investigating the alarm. For instance, intel gathered from reviewing the footage of the incident. Some customers have also found this feature useful as a record for why the Assignee determined this alarm should be "Marked as False".

To close the alarm, simply select "Complete" or "Mark as False".
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Once an alarm is closed, it will not show in the Alarm Inbox list if your filter is set to the default "Show Only Open Alarms". The Status will change to Closed with the date and time of closing. If you would like to further investigate this alarm or determine that it was handled incorrectly, you can reopen the alarm by changing the filter to "Show Closed Alarms", choosing the closed alarm in question and selecting Reopen.