User did not receive an Alert/Alarm

When troubleshooting problems related to missing alerts or alarms, its important to keep in mind that Voalte is the endpoint for a much larger overall "alarm management" system, often involving middleware. Because of that, the fastest way to resolution involves determining which specific component in that system is not performing as expected.

A first step in that process is to determine if other units or users are receiving alarms as expected from the same system. For example, if a user reports not receiving any notification for a Nurse Call that they expected, are other users on that same unit also reporting the same behavior? If other users are receiving alarms, a good next step is checking the Nurse Call assignment system itself to determine if there is an issue with that individual users' assignments that's preventing the alarms from being dispatched to the Voalte system entirely. If no users are receiving alarms, it's a good idea to check if there were any recent systemic changes in the middleware systems themselves. Voalte Platform uses a whitelisting system to control which systems can send alarms to Voalte users - if there was an upgrade, failover, or IP address change in the middleware system, the new configuration may need to be whitelisted on the Voalte server for any alarms to start being accepted. It's always a good idea to inform Voalte Support ahead of any planned maintenances to the middleware systems to allow pro-active testing and resolution.

Voalte Platform has a specific schema that incoming alarms need to be sent as in order for them to be formatted properly on the end-user devices. If the ringtone is not as expected for the given alarm type, the alarm header reads "UNKNOWN SENDER", or the message itself appears incorrect, that is a good indication that the alarms are not being sent in the correct schema. Contact your middleware vendor to see if they have made any changes recently and ensure that they have the Voalte-specific configuration mode enabled.

Some additional troubleshooting steps:

1. Is the alert/alarm set up as a Voalte Alarm Destination (VAD)?
   1. Check that the user has selected the correct Role, Location, Room(s) and/or Team.
      
      
2. Does your organization perform user based shift assignments?
   1. Have the user check that they have been assigned in the console as the correct role for the correct location(s).
   2. Some assignments allow for shift times to be entered – also have them check to see if this is correct.
      
      
3. Was the patient moved to another room?
   1. Sometimes patients are moved to new rooms – assignments do not follow the patient, they are tied to a room. The user will need to update their shift selection or assignment within the console.

If none of these steps resolve the issue and a ticket needs to be opened with Voalte Technical Support, it's important to gather answers to the following questions to allow for the fastest possible resolution:

1. What is the extension of the user that is reporting the missed notifications?
2. What is the type of alarm that is being missed (Nurse Call, Patient Monitor, Manual Paging, etc.)?
3. Which vendor supports the middleware system for the missed alarm?
4. What time did they expect to receive the alarm (include time zone)? Getting the time as exact as possible helps aid investigation.
5. What are the results of attempting to sign in with the same user to a different physical device?
6. When did this behavior start?
7. Can this be reproduced on-demand?
8. Have there been any recent changes or upgrades to other components of the greater alarm system?