How to respond to a temperature alarm

A temperature alarm means a reading crossed a configured limit for long enough to activate the rule. Start with the equipment and product condition. The reading tells you where to look; your site's food safety or quality procedure decides what to do with affected stock.

1. Find the equipment and check the reading

Open Alarms in the dashboard and select the alarm. The inbox shows the affected point or device, site, severity, current state, and time since activation. If you manage several sites, use the site and severity filters or search for a point name or device serial.

Compare the triggering reading with the configured limit. Check the site's local time so you know when the condition began. If the alarm concerns a device that stopped reporting, follow the offline sensor checklist; the last recorded value is not a current temperature.

2. Read the trend before deciding what happened

Open the alarm graph and inspect the readings before and after activation. The view marks alarm events and effective limits so you can distinguish a short excursion from a continuing rise. A gap or a chart load error is missing evidence, not proof that the equipment recovered. Retry the chart if it fails to load, and check the unit on site when readings are unavailable.

3. Acknowledge when a person takes responsibility

An active alarm can be acknowledged from the inbox or its detail page. Add a short note naming what you checked or who is responding. Acknowledgement records that a person has taken the alarm and pauses its escalation path according to the incident's recorded policy; it does not mean the temperature is safe or the incident is resolved. If the alarm remains open when the acknowledgement pause expires, paging can resume. The actual resumption is recorded separately from the scheduled deadline.

The inbox distinguishes alarms waiting for a response from acknowledged alarms that are still open. A pending alarm has not activated and cannot be acknowledged. If acknowledgement fails because the connection drops, the alarm remains available to retry; check that its state actually changes before leaving the page.

4. Follow your site's corrective-action procedure

Check the door, power, setpoint, airflow, and equipment condition as appropriate. Use your site's procedure for measuring product temperature, moving stock, and deciding whether it can be used. Add an incident note in the alarm detail so the next shift can see the action and time taken. Contact the responsible technician or manager when the issue is outside your authority.

5. Confirm recovery and keep the record

Look for fresh readings back inside the configured range and verify the physical unit. The alarm timeline distinguishes activation, acknowledgement, and resolution. If the sensor is offline, wait for a new report before treating the graph as current. For a multi-site review, export the alarm record and check recurring alarms on the same equipment.

Read the full lifecycle on the graph

The graph pairs the readings with a chronological lifecycle history. Select an event to inspect its exact time, response note and recorded actor. Repeated acknowledgements remain separate entries, and a new occurrence on the same point is linked as a re-alarm when that relationship was recorded.

The acknowledgement pause applies while an incident remains open. The recall cooldown applies after a visible resolution and can suppress a repeat breach of the same or lower severity. A more severe breach can raise a new alarm during that cooldown. Scheduled pause and cooldown deadlines are labelled as scheduled; they do not prove that a notification was sent or that the equipment was healthy.

Historical graphs and exports use the settings and events recorded at the time. Older records with missing settings are identified explicitly, rather than reconstructed using today's profile. A failed history request is shown as unavailable with retry, rather than as an empty incident record.

Set up the next response before it is needed

• Configure alarm profiles and delays for each type of equipment.
• Choose notification channels that reach the people covering each shift.
• Use the setup checklist in the dashboard to send a test notification after a sensor is reporting and an alarm is armed.