SLAC Alarm Manager

The SLAC Alarm Manager is a python package providing an interface to the NALMS alarm system. It contains two main ways of interacting with NALMS. There is a standalone python application for viewing and interacting with alarms described in greater detail here. And a PyDM data plugin that will allow for building PyDM displays containing summary alarms.

Installation

The easiest installation method is using pip to install from PyPI into a virtual environment:

pip install slac-alarm-manager

It can also be installed from source using pip from the repository here: https://github.com/slaclab/slac-alarm-manager

Setting up Alarm Configurations

The alarm hierarchies displayed in this system are defined using xml files. As an example, we can look at this file:

https://github.com/pcdshub/pcds-nalms/blob/master/XML/KFE/GMDXGMD.xml

The top level config name, nalms-kfe-GMDXGMD, represents the system being monitored. It will also be referred to as the alarm topic or kafka topic in the rest of this documentation. A component is a way of grouping PVs together in whatever way makes sense. For more information about the valid options for each pv, please see the description of these at the NALMS documentation here: https://slaclab.github.io/nalms/configuration/.