Practical Alarm Suppression of End-to-End Virtual Circuit Connections

摘要

Alarm correlation is the process by which several alarms are narrowed from a mass of problems to a root cause and side effects. Different approaches to the problem have been proposed and a number of commercial systems are available. These systems are powerful, but are also complex, expensive, and difficult to use. Real network management, however, demands a simple, efficient, and yet effective alarm correlation mechanism. This paper presents such a mechanism that takes advantage of containment hierarchy and association of managed objects and suppresses common side effect alarms on user connections caused by failures on higher level objects. The proposed approach is decentralized in that alarm suppressing is jointly performed by multiple subsystems at different levels. The approach is also simple and efficient, as it does not require runtime rule evaluation or decoding. Yet, it is effective, suppressing side effect alarms caused by higher level objects both within and cross network boundaries, and handles alarms arriving out of order.