Fault management

The NetMaster series provides functions for acquisition, storage and presentation of alarms and events from the managed network.

Typical fault management tasks include:

 Alarm acquisition in the form of notification reception from NEs

 Display network alarm status in many different ways

 Coloring of graphical objects in the network views

 Display new (un-acknowledged) alarms and old (acknowledged) alarms independently.

 Propagation of the highest severity level upwards in the network display hierarchy.

 Display alarm summary count

 Display current alarms

 Alarms acknowledging, un-acknowledging and commenting

 Audible notifications upon severity level increase.

 Display historical alarms; specify advanced filters/queries.

5.3.1 Network alarm status

The status of the network and network elements is displayed through a graphical object coloring scheme in the graphical views. When the network is structured into a hierarchy of administrative domains, the alarm severity colors are propagated upwards in the hierarchy.

To ensure that new events are always in focus, there are two levels of alarm coloring and propagation:

 The highest un-acknowledged (new) alarm severity status is displayed in the fill area of the graphical symbol.

 The highest acknowledged (old) alarm severity status is displayed as a thin frame around the graphical symbol.

The graphical symbols in the map views also display the number of alarms of the highest severity for both acknowledged and un-acknowledged alarms. The coloring scheme used for each severity level can be configured in the

Preferences dialog.

Network alarm status

5.3.2 Alarm summary

The Alarm summary view shows an overview of all alarms for all managed NEs and provides a quick overview of the alarm status in the entire network.

The view displays the Severity count graph: a graphical presentation of alarms of each severity category in the entire network. The graph includes a bar for each of the categories Critical, Major, Minor, Warning, Indeterminate, and Info.

The view will only present active alarms, i.e. clearable alarms in a raised state, and not those that have been cleared. The same alarm state is presented in the Active alarms view.

Whenever an alarm is cleared on the equipment, it disappears from the Alarm summary view, but can be found in the Historical alarms view.

Alarm summary

By clicking one of the severity bars, a filtered Active alarms view containing the alarms of the selected severity level will be opened.

5.3.3 Display Active Alarms

The Active Alarms view presents active alarms for a selected scope, and allows the operator to acknowledge alarms which have been followed up.

An active alarm is a clearable alarm in the raised state (i.e. not yet cleared).

Whenever an alarm is cleared, it will be removed from the table, but can still be found in a corresponding scope in the Historical alarms view.

Display active alarms

Each user may select which attributes are shown in the alarms table, in which order the fields appear, and may sort the table ascending/descending on any column.

The Active alarms view contains two powerful filtering mechanisms for further drill-down within the current scope. It is possible to show or hide alarms based on their acknowledgement status, or, using an instant filtering function, showing only alarms that contain a certain textual pattern in one or more attribute.

Alarm filters

5.3.4 Display historical alarms

The Historical alarms view displays a table of all historical alarms or events for a selected scope. Historical alarms are alarms that have been raised and then cleared. The Historical alarms view also shows alarms that are non-clearable, i.e. events. Whenever an alarm appears in the Historical alarms table it will disappear from any table with the same scope in the Active alarms view.

Historical alarms

The advanced filter function in the Historical alarms view can help you when analyzing situations with errors or poor performance in your network. By studying other errors and the order they appeared for the NE, this view can help you identify and solve the "root cause problem".

To navigate quickly in a large data set, the Time slider function may be of great help. The Time slider shows a histogram of the number of alarms occurring along the time axis, and the area indicated with green color shows what time interval is currently presented in the alarm table. It is possible to expand this time interval, or to zoom in for a further detailed histogram.

It is possible to set up auto-refresh of the Historical alarms view.

The Historical alarms table may display the following fields for each alarm:

Historical alarms

Name Explanation

Resource Name Source of alarm - the network resource that generated the alarm Alarm Text Gives the most likely reason for the alarm. Similar to "Native Probable

Cause", as defined in TMF608. This is a textual description of the cause of the alarm, displayed exactly as sent from the NE or portrayed in the EMS user interface. The text can be customized using the Alarm Templates view.

Severity One of the possible alarm severities: CRITICAL, MAJOR, MINOR, WARNING, INDETERMINATE or INFO. Severities can be customized using the Alarm Templates view.

Raised Time (NE) The time on the NE when the alarm was raised.

Cleared Time (NE) The time on the NE when the alarm was cleared.

Acknowledged Checked if the alarm has been acknowledged

Probable Cause A mapping of the Probable Cause Qualifier and/or Native Probable Cause with a set of predefined Probable Causes as defined in TMF608

Probable Cause Qualifier

A code for uniquely identifying the alarm, e.g. used in the Alarm Templates view.

Alarm type A text which identifies the type of alarm. Used internally to map the alarm to a corresponding name.

Value is one of the following (as defined in TMF608 and specified by X.733:EventType):

- communicationsAlarm - environmentalAlarm - equipmentAlarm - processingErrorAlarm - qualityOfServiceAlarm

Raised Time (System) The time when NetMaster received the alarm raised event.

Cleared Time (System)

The time when NetMaster received the alarm cleared event.

Is Clearable Y if the alarm/event represents a condition that will be restored at a later time (otherwise blank)

5.3.5 Audible notifications

NetMaster is capable of playing selected sound files based on user configurable criteria such as alarm severity and alarm type. The selected sound files can be played once or continuously until the raised or cleared alarm is acknowledged by the user. For elements under maintenance, the alarm sound may be temporarily or permanently disabled (muted).

5.3.6 Email notifications

NetMaster can issue email notifications to selected recipients based on user configurable criteria such as alarm severity and alarm type.

5.3.7 Alarms customization

NetMaster provides functions for customizing the alarms through alarm templates. The predefined alarm text and severity level of individual alarms can be modified, and individual alarms can be blocked from being logged and reported.

Alarm customization templates

Alarm templates are assigned to the various NEs through an Alarm template assignment view.