Alarms that are in alarm but should not be

I have a number of alarms showing up as Active/acknowledged but they should not be. They are simple bit alarms (all the logic is in the PLC) and the tag browser accurately indicates the bits are false but the alarm still shows up in the alarm list. It seems like they are old alarms that are stuck in some alarm table. There has been mentions of a .alarms file used to persist alarms over gateway reboots but I can’t find this file (I am running 7.7 so it might be gone?).

Any ideas? Thanks.

Hi,

Is the system redundant? If not, what version are you using specifically? If possible, try disabling one of the tags (edit, set enabled to false) and see if it goes away.

The .alarms file does exist, in some cases, but I don’t think that’s the cause in this case.

If the alarm doesn’t go away when the tag is disabled, there may be multiple definitions of the tag running (something which should be prevented in 7.7.4, but can be fixed otherwise).

Regards,

The system is not redundant. It appears I am using 7.7.1. Maybe I should upgrade.

The bit is part of a UDT. When I disable the tag (but leave the alarm definition intact) in the UDT definition the alarm goes away for all of the tags that use this UDT. When I enabled it they all come back.

Hi,

In that case, you might try upgrading. Just to clarify, though, these alarms do persist across gateway restarts?

If so, and if it’s possible to restart at some point soon, you might want to just make sure it’s not the .alarms file getting in the way (I remember that there were some fixes to the way data was sorted, which might have led to something like this, but I can’t find exactly when).

Basically, when you shut down the gateway service, a file called “.alarms_…” will sometimes be written to “{InstallDir}\data”. Remember that you probably have to tell windows to show all files in the folder. If it’s there, while the service is shut down, delete it. Then restart the service.

Regards,

I upgraded and the alarms stayed. They also persist across gateway restarts. And there is no .alarms_… file when the gateway is running or stopped.

This is not a production system so I can do almost anything I want.

I seem to remember something like this happening to me once, I ended up either changing the Alarm Mode to Not Equal or changing the Setpoint to 0 then saving the UDT, then changing the alarm back to how I had it and saving the UDT again. Worth a try :slight_smile:

I had the value set to 0 not 1… :blush: