When alarms do not display correctly

Alarms may display incorrectly for a variety of reasons. The following table lists some common issues and resolutions:

Issue Cause Resolution

Alarm Log and Event Log do not display any data.

If there are two alarm servers, primary and redundant (standby), they may be synchronizing. This causes data to display slowly.

Data will display; but it could take several minutes.

Alarms display in Alarm Log, but not in Event Log or Banner

The missing alarms were triggered while the runtime graphics page was not running.

These alarms will only display in the Alarm Log unless they are triggered again while the runtime graphics page is running. This will only affect alarms that were triggered before the runtime screen was running.
PC-based and onboard alarms do not appear or disappear as expected.

This is due to the difference between way the two alarm types are handled:

When an alarm is enabled, the system processes alarms for that tag. If the alarm is disabled, the system cannot process alarms for that tag.

For the PC-Based alarm, the condition for this is, for example, IA > 80; if the tag value for IA is > 80, the appearance will show. The tag is constantly scanned, so the condition triggers the alarm once it is enabled.

For the Onboard alarm, the condition for this is a digital tag, which is set by the driver when a new alarm record on the device is read. If the alarm was disabled, the driver cannot set the digital tag. When the alarm is enabled, nothing happens because the alarm was already "processed" by the driver and will never get reprocessed.

 There is no resolution.

The number of alarms that display is fewer than the limit set by Alarm Summary length parameter.

This happens when the number of alarms exceeds 1000 and the system has multiple clusters.

Use one or more of these procedures:

Set alarm filtering in the alarm viewer to reduce the number of alarms that can display.

Only support a one-cluster system.

If a multiple-cluster system is necessary, display a separate alarm page for each cluster.

Cannot filter on categories for alarms.

The new categories do not display in the list when you want to select them.

Use Custom Filter 8 instead. Currently, it is the only means available for adding custom filtering to alarms.

Page Down button causes an empty page to display.

The last alarm was on the previous page. When there are no more alarms, pressing Page Down displays a blank page.

Click Page Up to return to the previous page (and the last alarms for the system).