Abstract
A single fault in a telecommunication network frequently results in a number of alarms being reported to the network operator. This multitude of alarms can easily obscure the real cause of the fault. In addition, when multiple faults occur at approximately the same time, it can be difficult to determine how many faults have occurred, thus creating the possibility that some may be missed. A variety of solution approaches have been proposed in the literature, however, practically deployable, commercial solutions remain elusive. The experiences of the Network Fault and Alarm Correlator and Tester (NetFACT) project, carried out at IBM Research and described in this paper, provide some insight as to why this is the case, and what must be done to overcome the barriers encountered. Our observations are based on experimental use of the NetFACT system to process a live, continuous alarm stream from a portion of the Advantis physical backbone network, one of the largest private telecommunications networks in the world.
The NetFACT software processes the incoming alarm stream and determines the faults from the alarms. It attempts to narrow down the likely root causes of each fault, to the greatest extent possible, given the available information. To accomplish this, NetFACT employs a novel combination of diagnostic techniques supported by an object-oriented model of the network being managed. This model provides an abstract view of the underlying network of heterogeneous devices. A number of issues were explored in the project including the extensibility of the design to other types of networks, and impact of the practical realities that must be addressed if prototype systems such as NetFACT are to lead to commercial products.
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© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Houck, K., Calo, S., Finkel, A. (1995). Towards a Practical Alarm Correlation System. In: Sethi, A.S., Raynaud, Y., Faure-Vincent, F. (eds) Integrated Network Management IV. IM 1995. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34890-2_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34890-2_20
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