I recently got a request from engineering to know how many "audible"/new alarms are generated every two weeks. They are wanting a report so they can determine which alarms are nuisance alarms. My first pass at this request was to create a new event file in Process History View, and then apply the following filters:
Unfortunately, this is capturing every event when an alarm changes to active and unacknowledged, and not just "audible"/new alarms. What can happen is an operator can not acknowledge an alarm, and it can bounce in and out of alarm, but they are not receiving an "audible" or new alarm each time.
After reading about alarms in Books Online, I believe the NALM field is what I need to track. However, in the event log, I only see when this field is set to 0 (operator acknowledges alarm), and not when it is set to 1. If an alarm's NALM field is set to 0 within the date range that I am reviewing, then I know the first ACT/UNACK alarm after that will be an "audible". The problem is if an alarm has been sitting unacknowledged. As far as I can tell, within the event log, there is now way to know when the NALM field is 1 or transitions from 0 to 1.
Is there an "easy" way to track when the NALM field goes to 1, without writing custom logic for every alarm in every module?
Would I have more information available to me if I used SQL on the event Journals in the Chronicle database to "know" if it is a new alarm? I poked around a little bit in the Journal table, but didn't immediately see anything.
Thank you.