An EPICS record is always in one of five "alarm" states:
| Status | Color |
| NO_ALARM | Green |
| MINOR | Yellow |
| MAJOR | Red |
| INVALID | White |
| not Connected | White box or Pink |
These states can be monitored for example by the Alarmhandler (CA-Client). Standard medm user interfaces as well display them quite often. To ensure consistency it is important to stick to the same colours as used now.
You should always check the alarm state of a record in your own programs and react accordingly. The record value alone will not be enough to differ between "good" and "bad" values.
Because EPICS already provides the possibility to enter limits for the alarms in the record, you should take advantage from this. If you put the limits into the client programs and do the comparison yourself, all other programs, for example command line ca-commands, will not show the alarms. On the other hand, using the record makes later changes easier, because you only have to change at one point.