Alarm profiles basics

An alarm profile is a reusable set of rules that decides when a reading becomes a problem and who hears about it. Instead of configuring every sensor by hand, you define a profile once and apply it to every device that should behave the same way.

What a profile contains

• Thresholds — the high and low limits for the condition you are watching. A freezer profile might alarm above −15 °C; a vaccine fridge profile holds a much tighter band.
• A delay (debounce) — how long a reading can sit out of range before the profile raises an alarm. This is what keeps a normal defrost cycle or a brief door-open from generating noise.
• Severity — how urgent the condition is, which you can use to route different alarms to different people or channels.
• An escalation policy — who is notified first, and who is notified next if no one acknowledges in time.

Why profiles beat per-device settings

When you run more than a handful of sensors, per-device settings drift apart and gaps appear. A profile gives you one place to change a rule for every freezer at once, and it makes your intent auditable: all cold-storage sensors follow the Cold Storage profile.

Escalation, briefly

Escalation is the part operators tell us sold them. If the first person does not acknowledge an alarm within the window you set, FreshControls automatically moves to the next person on the list, and can keep climbing until someone responds. Nothing sits in a warning state until morning.

A practical starting point

1. Group your devices by the range they need to hold — freezers, coolers, ambient, and so on.
2. Create one profile per group with sensible thresholds and a short delay.
3. Attach an escalation policy so an unacknowledged alarm always reaches a second person.
4. Apply the profile to every device in the group and adjust from real-world behavior over the first week.

Related

• Notification channels
• Troubleshooting offline sensors