> And for a technology example, a database server disappearing might raise a single alarm, but the applications that rely on that database might raise countless alarms as attempts to connect fail over and over again.

Right. The lingo for this is “cascading alarms”, and there are various mechanisms to suppress consequential alarms if you design well. If an “upstream” alarm results in further alarms/events downstream; these should be suppressed (still recorded, just not alarms), until the root alarm cause is resolved.

I thought this was well understood in the industry, but perhaps not.