Description
The "Alarm Tab" shows the settings of which an alarm will either be triggered or reset.

An alarm is triggered when a watch item fails.  See Failure Descriptions for more for more on why watch items fail.

Fields and Buttons

Trigger

• Active - Trigger alarm action when a run fails. By default, this option is checked/active. *WARNING* Un-checking this option will prevent an alarm ever from being triggered.
• Action - Opens the "Set Alarm Actions" dialog box.  There are four types of actions that can be performed:

Send an email

Show a visual alert window

Execute a command (.exe) or load a URL

Play a wave file sound

• User Trigger Escalation Rules - (Trial and Enterprise only) Escalation Rules offer a deeper level of configuration for triggering alarm actions.  Check this option to use trigger escalation rules and to enable the "Configure Rules" button.
• Configure Rules - Click this button to open the "Configure Escalation Rules" dialog.

Number of consecutive failed responses to trigger alarm

• By default, this field is set to 1.

• You may want set the trigger to 2 or more consecutive failures in the event of a false alarm.
  Consider this scenario. You set up a watch to ping your site every minute. You set the alarm trigger at 5 consecutive failures. That would mean that you only want to be notified if your site is actually down for a full five minutes.

Reset Alarm when this item responds again. (If this box is unchecked, the alarm will need to be reset manually)

• By default, this option is checked/active.

• To manually reset an alarm, in the main window, under the menu "Edit", click on the menu option "Reset Alarm".

• It may be useful to uncheck this option if you only want an alarm to be reset with total human intervention.

Number of consecutive successful responses to automatically reset alarm

• By default, this field is set to 1.

• You may want set the trigger to 2 or more consecutive failures in the event of a false reset of an alarm.
  Consider this scenario. You set up a watch to ping your site every minute. You set the alarm trigger at 5 consecutive successful responses. That would mean that you only want the alarm to be reset when the site is responding for a full five minutes.