In the power grid, recording the events before, during and after a disturbance is often the only way to find out what has happened, and to reliably investigate a disturbance or event afterwards. Storing complete and reliable information about these disturbances in the primary and secondary system is accomplished by the disturbance recorder. With continuous event logging of both binary and analog signals and accurate time tagging, fault investigation will take less time and will give more conclusive results.

A disturbance recording application is characterized by great flexibility of the configuration, starting conditions, resolution and storage capacity. It also requires advanced analytical software to evaluate the collected disturbance recordings.

All modern protection and control IEDs (Intelligent Electronic Device) contain their own disturbance recording functionality, ensuring that no event is lost. A dedicated disturbance recorder gives greater flexibility in the number of signals that can be monitored though, and offers better performance (a higher sampling frequency) and greatly increases storage.