Manitou offers flexibility and versatile options to improve Company productivity. One of these options is Virtual Operator.

The Virtual Operator feature of Manitou allows the automation of certain alarm handling actions.  The Virtual Operator can process Action Pattern instructions that don’t require human intervention, such as sending emails, sending pages, sending text messages, deferring alarms for a certain period of time, and so forth.

 In order to use the Virtual Operator, an Action Pattern must be defined.  There are two ways to engage the Virtual Operator.  The first is to create a first step in the Action Pattern that can be performed automatically.  Upon saving the Action Pattern, the pattern will be flagged with “First Action Auto,” which will automatically engage the Virtual Operator.  The Virtual Operator will then proceed through the Action Pattern until it comes to a step that requires human intervention, such as making a phone call.  At this point, the alarm will be sent to an operator for action.

The second way to engage the Virtual Operator is by selecting Hold, then Defer to Virtual Operator in Manitou.  The Virtual Operator will then proceed through the Action Pattern until the next human-performed action.

There are a few other reasons that an alarm normally handled by the Virtual Operator will be sent to an operator:

• The Action Pattern is not marked as “First Action Auto”
• The operator explicitly fetched the alarm
• The Broker determined that the Virtual Operator was down
• The alarm’s last activity time appears to be 10 seconds or more old
• The customer has active temporary comments
• The unlikely event that the operator has the Virtual Operator attribute set in the Broker

Otherwise, the Virtual Operator will process Action Patterns that do not require human intervention.

If you need support or have any questions please give us a call, our support team will be happy to assist you.