Alarms with null Active Data

Hi all,

The alarms have been working for a week or two with no major issues, until now.

It looks like a few hours ago every tag that we had an alarm for all alarmed at the same time - we got hundreds if not thousands of them, and they were all automatically acknowledged and cleared within 3 seconds of each other.

The problem is that when I view the alarms, none of them have any Active Data, so I cannot, for example, see if there was a real alarm condition, or when any issues may have occurred. Below is an example of one of the alarms:

{Source: 'proj:PMCS:/tgrp:BLCKYTRR/BLCKYTRR:/tag:Day_Tank_Leak_A:/alm:', Display Path: '', UUID: 'cf8a6e56-d938-4167-952f-23c92b6e7a8a', Current State: 'Cleared, Acknowledged', Priority: 'Diagnostic', Active Data: null, Clear Data: {eventTime=Tue May 27 13:59:23 PDT 2014}, Ack Data: {eventTime=Tue May 27 13:59:23 PDT 2014}, Runtime Data: {}}

I had assumed that the first state of any created alarm would have been Active, and I perhaps wrongly assumed that every alarm would therefore have a non-None Active Data associated with it.

So my questions are:
-Why are some alarms being created without any Active Data? (or how can an alarm Clear if it was never Active?)
-What can I do to try and find out why everything alarmed at the same time?

FYI - the data comes from a Kepserver installation on another machine. Someone else is logged into it now so I can’t see if anything happened to it around the time of the issue. I figure worst case would be someone rebooted it, but if so I’d expect the Active time on the alarms to be when it lost contact with Kepserver, and the Clear time would be when it came back up.

Charles

I have an additional question too:

-Is it possible to generate an alarm if the connection to the OPC server fails?