5.3 Alarms & Notifications Templates

Key Concepts and Terms

Alarm and notification templates are designed for:

Defining rules that determine the status of monitoring objects.
Setting conditions under which alerts are generated.
Specifying user groups that will receive those alerts.
Defining the alarm events that trigger recording of monitoring objects.

How Statuses Work

Each monitoring object has a set of parameters determined by its decoder. The combination of current parameter values defines the object's status. The decoder retrieves these values and passes them to an analyzer, which evaluates the status and processes any changes.

In MultiProbe, statuses are expressed through alarm priorities — numerical values that correspond to the severity of an event. Five categories are defined:

Log
Advisory
Caution
Warning
Error

To determine a monitoring object's status, the user configures conditions for the analyzer's parameters (via presets, as described in Section 5.2). As parameters change at runtime, the analyzer checks whether defined conditions are met and, if so, changes the status and sends a notification.

Example: For an MPEG TS transport stream, the state is defined by ETSI TR 101 290 parameters — such as the Continuity Counter Error (CCE) count — implemented in the MPEG TS decoder and the MS TR-290 analyzer. If a user sets the condition CCE > 6 and this is triggered, the analyzer changes the stream status and generates a notification. When CCE drops back below 6, the analyzer updates the status again.

Note

High-priority events mask low-priority events. If both occur simultaneously, the indicator reflects the higher-priority event only. MultiProbe implements three separate ETSI TR 101 290 analyzers — one per priority level.

Alarm Priority Categories

Table 29. Alarm priorities

Category	Priority Range	Recommended Use
Log	0–99	Conditions that require no immediate attention — used for event logging
Advisory	100–199	Conditions that may potentially lead to issues. Worth monitoring
Caution	200–299	Conditions that may result in problems if no action is taken
Warning	300–399	Conditions that may immediately cause problems. Action advised
Error	400–499	Conditions indicating quality degradation. Immediate action required

Priority thresholds are fixed in MultiProbe and cannot be changed by users. Users assign a specific priority value to each condition when configuring analyzers in the Alarm templates section. The analyzer determines the alarm category from this value.

Priorities also support flexible sorting and filtering of events — how they are used is entirely at the user's discretion.

Priority Display Element

Each condition in the analyzer configuration is represented by a graphical priority element (Figure 132), which shows:

The category symbol.
The priority range for that category.
The user-defined priority value within that range.

Figure 132. Priority designations

Example: For the condition CCE > 6, a user might assign priority 450 — placing it in the Error category.

An example of using priorities to reflect remaining disk space is shown in Figure 133 — the less space remains, the higher the priority assigned.

Figure 133. Example — using priorities to monitor free disk space

Note

Conditions are configured not only to escalate priority, but also to cancel an elevated priority and return to the previous state.

Rules for Composing Conditions

To define an alarm priority, the user writes a logical expression for one or more parameters. The expression evaluates to:

True — condition is met; status change and notification are triggered.
False — condition is not met; no action is taken.

Parameter names are taken from the Column name field in the analyzer's Measures list (see Section 5.3.3). A reference guide to analyzer parameters is provided in Section 10.

Supported operators: AND, OR, NOT, =, <, >, <=, >=.

Examples:

Trigger a notification when artifacts are detected in a compressed image — Video QoE Analyzer (Video monitoring object):
```
ArtefactsLevel <= 30
```
Cancel the Error status for "Signal lost" and return to the previous status — Input Signal Analyzer (Signal monitoring object):
```
SyncLocked = 1
```
Trigger an alarm for a PAT table error per ETSI TR 101 290 — MS TR-290 Priority 1 Analyzer (MPEG TS monitoring object):
```
PAT_invalid_table_id = 0 AND PAT_scrambled = 0 AND PAT_repetition_error = 0
```

Configuration of Alarm Templates

The Alarm templates screen is used to configure the templates that govern how alarm events are generated. The data received by an analyzer from its decoder is fixed (defined by hardware or standards such as ETSI TR 101 290) and cannot be edited by the user. What users configure are the conditions under which the analyzer changes status and generates notifications.

To access alarm templates, select Alarm templates in the Alarms & notifications templates menu on the Configuration screen.

Figure 134. Alarm templates configuration screen

The screen is divided into three sections:

Analyzers — select the analyzer to configure. The list shows:

Column	Description
Analyzer	Name of the analyzer
Type	Type of analyzer

Measures — lists the data items received by the selected analyzer from its decoder. This list is read-only and provided for reference when writing conditions. For each item:

Column	Description
Column name	Name used in condition formulas
Measure name	Display name of the measurement
Unit	Unit of measurement

To copy a parameter name for use in a template formula, click .

Alarm templates — the condition table for the selected analyzer (Figure 135). Each analyzer has default conditions that users can edit. The complete list of default conditions is provided in Section 11. Users can also add new conditions.

Figure 135. Example of an alarm template table

Template Condition Parameters

Table 30. Alarm template fields

Field	Description
Priority	Priority value for this condition, determining the alarm category. Mandatory — set based on the criticality of the condition. See Section 5.3.1 for category definitions
Alarm name	Name of the alarm event as displayed in notifications
Description	Free-form description of the alarm event
Fire condition	Logical expression defining when the status changes and a notification is triggered. Parameter names come from the Column name column in the Measures panel. See Section 5.3.2
Fire interval	Interval (s) between successive checks of the fire condition. Shorter intervals increase CPU load
Back to normal condition	Logical expression for returning to the previous status. Uses the same syntax as the fire condition
Calm interval	Interval (s) between successive checks of the back-to-normal condition. Shorter intervals increase CPU load

Adding and Editing Conditions

To add a new condition, click New alarm template. The editing window opens (Figure 136):

Click Show measures to select the parameter for the condition. Only parameters without existing conditions are shown.
Fill in the fields per Table 30.
To reset to preset defaults, click Back to default (available only if defaults exist for the selected parameter).

Figure 136. Alarm template editing window

To edit an existing condition, select it from the list via its item menu. The same editing window is used.

Configuration of Alarm Presets

The Alarm presets screen is used to:

Create collections of alarm templates for application to monitoring objects.
Select user groups that will receive notifications.
Enable or disable recording of monitoring objects based on alarm events.

Alarm presets contain a list of templates without being tied to a specific analyzer. This allows assembling alerts from multiple analyzers for a single monitoring object. For example, a preset for an MPEG TS transport stream can include selected conditions from the Priority 1, 2, and 3 ETSI TR 101 290 analyzers while excluding irrelevant ones.

Warning

The alarm preset list is not type-specific. Any alarm template can be added to any preset, and the preset can be applied to any monitoring object. However, only templates whose parameters are implemented by the corresponding analyzer will have any effect at runtime. Users are responsible for ensuring compatibility between templates, presets, and the monitoring objects they are applied to.

To access alarm presets, select Alarm presets in the Alarms & notifications templates menu on the Configuration screen.

Figure 137. Alarm presets screen

The screen has two panels:

Presets — the list of presets. System presets (marked with ) cannot be modified but can be copied as a basis for new user presets.
Alarm templates — the list of templates in the selected preset.

Creating a Preset

Click New preset, then enter the preset name and description. System presets can be copied via the list item menu — this also opens the new preset creation window.

Adding Templates to a Preset

Select the user preset to which you want to add templates.
Click Add alarm templates. A template selection window opens (Figure 138).

Figure 138. Window for adding templates to a preset
Select the required templates. They are added to the preset but not yet saved.
To configure notifications for the added templates, select the templates using the group selection field (red arrow in Figure 139), then click Change groups.

Figure 139. Editing templates in a preset
In the group selection window (Figure 140), choose the notification groups whose members will receive alerts for this preset. At least one group must be assigned per template — otherwise, saving will produce an error.

Figure 140. Window for adding notification groups

Enabling Recording for Alarm Events

Within a preset, recording of the monitoring object can be enabled or disabled per alarm event. Select the templates to modify, then click Enable recording or Disable recording, and confirm in the dialog that appears.

To bulk-delete templates from a preset, select them and click Delete.

Note

Save the preset after completing all configuration. The preset can then be applied when configuring monitoring objects.