Operating instructions

Operating alarms
9.1 Overview
MP 377, MP 377 PRO (WinCC flexible)
238 Operating Instructions, 10/2008, 6AV6691-1DR01-0AB0
Alarm classes
Alarms are assigned to various alarm classes:
● Error
Alarms in this class must always be acknowledged. Error alarms normally indicate critical
errors within the plant such as "Motor temperature too high"
● Operation
Warning alarms usually indicate states of a plant such as "Motor switched on"
● System
System alarms indicate states or events which occur on the HMI device
● SIMATIC diagnostic alarms
SIMATIC diagnostic alarms show states and events of the SIMATIC S7
or SIMOTION PLCs
● User-specific alarm classes
The properties of this alarm class must be defined in the configuration
Further information on this may be available in your plant documentation.
Alarm groups
The configuration engineer can group alarms into alarm groups. When you acknowledge an
individual alarm of an alarm group, you acknowledge all alarms which belong to the same
alarm group.
Alarm buffer
The alarm events are stored in an internal buffer. The size of this alarm buffer depends on
the HMI device type.
Alarm report
The configuration engineer can activate alarm reporting on the project. In this case, alarm
events are output directly on the connected printer.
The configuration engineer can define whether each individual alarm is logged. An alarm of
this type is printed when the alarm events "Incoming" and "Outgoing" occur.
If you want to print alarms of the "System" alarm class, you have to print the contents of the
associated alarm buffer. For this case the configuration engineer has to configure an
operating element for printing the alarm buffer.
Alarm log
Alarm events are stored in an alarm log, provided this log file is configured. The capacity of
the log file is limited by the storage medium and system limits.