Chasing a Definition of “Alarm”

Abstract

Alarm management has been around for decades in telecom solutions. We have seen various efforts to define standardised alarm interfaces. The research community has focused on various alarms correlation strategies. Still, after years of effort in industry and research alike, network administrators are flooded with alarms; alarms are suffering from poor information quality; and the costs of alarm integration have not decreased. In this paper, we explore the concept of 'alarm'. We define 'alarm' and alarm-type concepts by investigating the different definitions currently in use in standards and research efforts. Based on statistical alarm data from a mobile operator we argue that operational and capital expenditures would decrease if alarm sources would apply to our alarm model.

Rethinking network management: Models, data-mining and self-learning

“…The alarm database contains close to 20 million alarms over a threemonth period. The investigation [5] shows that the alarms do not adhere to the basic alarm definition (Definition 1). Only about 10 % of the alarms required manual actions and only these should really qualify as alarms.…”

“…After considering various attempts to define what an alarm is, we have adopted the following definition [5]:…”

“…In the rest of this section we use the above taxonomy to describe our findings and recommendations [5], [6].…”

“…In our previous work [5] we also tried to establish a general state machine for alarms. But we have come to the conclusion that a state-machine will always depend on the actual context and usage of alarms.…”

“…D. thesis 1 . The work is fully described in previously published articles [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13]. 1 http://staff.www.ltu.se/ e stewal/noms-wallin-thesis.…”