A sum alarm can be seen as a collection of alarms that have one or several common denominators. The conditions you use to filter out which alarms the sum alarm monitors are the same conditions you use to filter the Alarms pane or an Alarm View. You can use wildcards when setting up filter conditions. For more information, see Filter Condition Wildcards .
For example, when an alarm is triggered you want to light a red operating lamp. Instead of connecting all alarms in the system to the indication lamp, you create a sum alarm and connect it to the indication lamp. You reduce the amount of alarms by configuring the sum alarm to only trigger when alarms with a certain priority and category are triggered.
In a multi-server system, a sum alarm created on the Enterprise Server functions as a container for alarms triggered on the SmartStruxure server devices. The advantage of creating the sum alarm on the Enterprise Server is that you do not need to create separate sum alarms for each SmartStruxure server device.