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Zone on Hold

Sometimes a single alarm-panel zone misbehaves — a faulty PIR, a door contact that keeps dropping, a tamper that flaps — and floods the queue with signals while a technician is on the way. Zone on Hold lets an operator temporarily silence that one zone for the control room, with a recorded reason and a "since" timestamp, so the rest of the site keeps reporting normally.

It is the alarm-zone equivalent of snoozing a noisy camera: targeted, reversible, and fully audited.

What a hold does​

While a zone is on hold:

  • Its signals stop reaching your control room. New events from that zone are not surfaced to operators and are not dispatched. They are recorded as held (you can see how many were muted), so nothing is lost from the record.
  • Only your control room is affected. A hold is scoped to your VCR. If another control room also monitors the site, it keeps receiving that zone's events. A hold can never silence a zone for a monitoring company that did not place it.
  • Every other zone is untouched. The hold is for one zone only — the rest of the site reports as normal.
  • It auto-expires (optionally). You can set an auto-release time (30 minutes up to 24 hours) or leave it open-ended and release it by hand. Either way it is non-destructive — it never changes the panel, the bypass state, or the site's monitoring status.
Hold vs. bypass

A bypass is set on the alarm panel itself and stops the panel from generating the signal at all. A hold is a control-room action — the panel still sends the signal and it is still recorded; the control room simply does not act on it while the hold is active. Use a hold when you want a temporary, audited mute that you can lift instantly.

Placing a zone on hold​

  1. Open the Sites page and select the site.
  2. In the site's detail panel, find the Alarm Zones list.
  3. On the zone you want to silence, click Hold.
  4. In the dialog, enter a short reason (e.g. "faulty sensor chattering — tech en route") and, if you want it to lift itself, choose an auto-release time. Leave the time on No expiry to release it manually later.
  5. Click Place on hold.

The zone row now shows an On hold since … line with the time the hold started, the auto-release time (if any), the reason, and a running count of how many signals have been muted.

Releasing a hold​

  • Click Release on the zone row to lift the hold immediately.
  • Or, if you set an auto-release time, the hold lifts itself when that time passes — there is nothing to remember to switch back.

As soon as a hold is released or expires, that zone's signals reach the control room again.

Permissions​

Placing and releasing holds uses the same capability as snoozing cameras (both quiet a noisy source). Operators without that capability see the zone state but not the Hold / Release buttons. Supervisors always have it.

note

A hold applies to the site-level (logical) zone, so it covers that zone even when it is reported by more than one hub. A zone that is not yet linked to the site-level structure cannot be held until it is linked.