An alarm at two in the morning, sent to nobody
A client's comms room has two air conditioning units and a temperature sensor on a monitoring system. At two in the morning one unit trips and the room temperature rises. The monitoring sends an alert email to the client's facilities manager, who is asleep, and a text to a number that belonged to an engineer who left your company last year. At seven the IT team arrives to a hot room and a phone call begins.
Alarms set up once and never maintained
Monitoring for critical cooling is often installed as part of a project and configured with whatever contacts made sense then. Over time staff change, rotas change and contracts change, but the alarm settings do not. Alarms that do reach you arrive as unstructured emails or texts, not as jobs.
- Alarm recipients are individuals, not a rota.
- Alerts do not say which unit or which site in a form your systems understand.
- Nothing escalates if the first person does not respond.
- The client does not know whether you have seen the alarm.
- There is no record of alarms, responses and times.
What a missed alarm costs
For the client, a hot server room risks their equipment and their operations. For you, a missed alarm on a system you maintain is a serious problem for the relationship, whatever the contract says. Even when alarms are caught, time is lost working out which site and system, and whether anyone is already on it.
The alarm route we build
- Alerts from clients' monitoring systems and BMS outputs are sent to one receiving address or endpoint that we set up, instead of to individuals.
- Each alert is read and matched to the client, site and system, from the sender, sensor name or content. Anything unmatched goes to a person.
- A ticket is opened in your job system, flagged as critical according to your rules, with the system's history attached.
- The on-call engineer is notified by text and call through Twilio, based on your rota. If nobody acknowledges within the time you set, it escalates to the next person.
- The client contact is told the alarm has been received and who is responding, and updated as the ticket progresses.
- Every alarm is logged with times: received, acknowledged, attended and cleared, for your review and the client's reports.
| Alarm step | Today | With the alarm route |
|---|---|---|
| Recipient | Whoever was set up years ago | One route, your rota |
| Identifying the site | Reading the email | Matched automatically |
| Ticket | Created later, if at all | Opened immediately |
| No response | Nothing happens | Escalates |
| Client update | They ring you | Told who is responding |
What counts as critical and how you respond is set by your contracts and your team. The route makes sure alarms reach the right person and are recorded.
Alarms that always reach someone
Alerts arrive at whoever is on call, not at a former employee. Escalation means a missed notification does not become a missed alarm. Clients hear from you before they have to call. And the alarm log shows response times, which helps in contract reviews and shows clients the value of the service.
It also changes the contract conversation. A client paying for critical cover can see, month by month, the alarms that came in and how each was handled, which is a far stronger case for renewal than a promise.
Is this your situation?
- Alarm recipients were set up years ago and not reviewed.
- Alarms have gone to people who have left.
- Alerts arrive as emails you have to interpret.
- Nothing escalates if an alarm is not acknowledged.
- You have no log of alarms and response times.