Methods of automatically configuring a power monitoring system based upon the locations of the monitoring devices in a hierarchy representing the spatial interrelationships of the monitoring devices. The power monitoring system includes a host computer communicatively coupled to a plurality of monitoring devices arranged in a hierarchy in an electrical system. Software on the host computer may execute any or all of an alarm aggregation algorithm for aggregating multiple alarms based on device location; a feature distribution algorithm for enabling/disabling selected device features; an evaluation algorithm for evaluating device applications; a device check algorithm for detecting flawed data; a custom configuration algorithm for customized configuration of thresholds on device-by-device basis; a host computer configuration algorithm for configuring the host computer; a redundancy algorithm for verifying an electrical event; an alarm configuration algorithm for configuring device thresholds; and a configuration error checking algorithm for detecting nomenclature issues.