According to HiveWatch’s 2026 report, large enterprises report false alarm rates nearing 44%. With false alarm rates that high, your team spends nearly half its time chasing noise, and most organizations cannot state their actual number when asked. So how does an organization stop the alarm fatigue inevitably caused by that many false alarms? The answer isn’t to slap an AI system on top in the hopes it will fix the problem. The answer is to build out a strategic alarm architecture. The creation and maintenance of an effective alarm architecture will drastically decrease the false alarm rate, increase situational awareness, and effectively determine which investments are worth making to improve your system.
Define What You Want to See and Where
The first issue that needs resolution is what you care about and where you care about it. If you alarm on motion everywhere, your operators will never notice the loitering event amidst all the noise. So get specific about which alerts matter and where. Do you care about loitering outside a secure perimeter, or only near restricted zones? Are there employee-only areas where every entry should register? Sit down with your team and spell out all the alerts that you want to see. This is a great time to bring in a 3rd party and conduct a threat/risk assessment if there is budget for it. An outside perspective can help identify threats and risks that your team might miss.
It is important at this stage to focus on what you need, and not to get bogged down with current capabilities. That comes later.
Don't Confuse Actionable Items with Observational Ones
A gun is detected on property, and the system notifies your operator. Does that show up on the same screen as the front door opening? A system should categorize your alerts into two buckets: events (things you want to know about) and alarms (things your operators must act on). That single distinction significantly decreases the alarm fatigue experienced by your team. Awareness-only notifications do not belong on the screen that displays emergencies.
Spoiler for later: it’s not unlikely that the events list will shrink, if not disappear, as you validate the new architecture later on. That’s ok. The bifurcation at this stage helps to ensure things aren’t missed.
Determine the Capability Gap
After defining what you care about, and splitting everything into two buckets, it's time to review your current capabilities. Categorize all events and alarms by what is achievable with your current system, what is partially achievable, and what isn't possible. Now review what upgrades to hardware and/or software can help you close the gap within your budget.
If you are interested in an AI platform to augment your current system, this is where you can see which gaps it would cover.
Validate Validate Validate
The key to any effective system is robust testing. Once you have defined the basic structure of the Alarm Architecture, put it to the test! Build a mock environment, or use an existing site, and route alarms and events to test users only. Have the team that built the architecture take turns running 2-hour shifts and take notes. This step will save a lot of tweaking once an architecture is implemented in production.
One key piece to embrace during the validation phase is iteration. The architecture can and should be tweaked with more test shifts run to reach the final schema that satisfies the needs of the organization. This iteration may also lead to items moving from the Events column to the Alarm column and vice versa. You may even decide (as one of my customers did) that an event bucket isn’t needed after all. There is no one-size-fits-all here. Make the architecture yours.
Do Your Operators Know What to Do for Each Specific Alarm?
An alarm is useless if the operator who receives it doesn't know how to respond. This is where ongoing maintenance of your Alarm Architecture is critical. Operators will require both initial training and ongoing testing to ensure the proper procedures are followed. One way to streamline this: build the guidance into the system so an alarm automatically opens an incident with the response spelled out.
Results
Completing the process above and developing your own unique alarm architecture will ensure that your false alarm rate drops and you know the key things taking place at your organization. You know what you are watching for and where, and you can measure against it. If you have technology gaps, justifying additional expenditure becomes easy as you can point to the exact threat or vulnerability the upgrade addresses. Situational awareness goes up, fatigue goes down, and your operators stop ignoring the screen on the assumption it is all noise.