Alarms & Panic Buttons

Two kinds of source can alert your people. An alarm is stateful - it has modes, arming, and per-mode policies, the shape of a security system. A panic button is stateless - it fires, immediately, every time, the shape of a button on a nightstand.

Creating an Alarm

Sources → Alarms → New Alarm.

• Name it for the thing it represents - Front Door, Perimeter, Smoke.
• It belongs to the location you are viewing; with several locations, the form asks.
• Modes decide who is alerted. Open each mode you use - Home, Away, Night - and bind it to an escalation policy; a mode with no policy alerts nobody in that mode. Custom modes can be added alongside the built-in three. Each mode also carries its own False Alarm Delay - a hold-before-dispatch window in which a disarm cancels the trigger outright - and a silent option.
• The Disarm entry in the Modes list holds one setting: whether disarming also clears an incident that is already escalating.
• Environment - every new alarm starts in Test, so nobody is contacted while you wire it up. Rehearse, then flip to Live when the chain reads right.
• What should your contacts do? - optional instructions shown to your contacts when this alarm fires: “Call me first. If I don’t answer please contact the authorities.”
• Only trigger when armed - off by default, and most setups should leave it off: your alarm system already decided the event was worth reporting. See Arming for what it changes.

The URLs Your Systems Call

Every alarm’s page carries a Connect card with its ready-to-copy endpoints - trigger, arm, and disarm URLs built on the alarm’s ID. Give them to anything that can make an HTTP request, with your API key in the header. The ID is an identifier, not a secret - a URL without the key can never fire anything.

Panic Buttons

Sources → Panic Buttons → New Panic Button. A panic button has no modes and no arming - it binds one policy and fires it every time, with no false alarm delay. Wire it to a physical button, a phone shortcut, or anything else a person in trouble might reach. Like alarms, each one is Live or Test - and starts in Test - and clear ends its incident.

Enabled, Disabled, and What Fires

A disabled source refuses its triggers (the API answers 404 - indistinguishable from a wrong ID, on purpose). An enabled alarm whose current mode has no working policy accepts the trigger and alerts nobody - the console flags that state loudly wherever it appears, because an alarm that reaches no one is configuration debt waiting for the worst moment.