Introduction to Alarm Management

By viewing alarms on network elements, you can discover and handle network element faults in a timely manner.

Alarm Severity

The alarm severity indicates the severity and importance of an alarm. eReplication classifies alarms into the four severities: critical, major, minor, and warning. Table 1 describes the definition and handling methods of different severities of alarms.

**Table 1** Alarm severity description
Severity	Definition	Handling Method
Critical	A critical alarm or event interrupts services or causes network elements to break down.	A critical alarm must be handled immediately. Otherwise, the system may break down. NOTE: Only critical alarms are displayed in Top 10 of the alarm information on the page.
Major	A major alarm or event affects network elements or system performance.	A major alarm must be handled as soon as possible. Otherwise, important functions cannot work correctly.
Warning	A minor alarm or event has no adverse impact on network elements or services. However, the system has detected a potential or imminent fault that is about to affect services.	A warning alarm prompts maintenance personnel to identify the alarm causes and rectify potential faults.
Info	A warning alarm has no adverse impact on system performance or customer business. However, there may be a potential impact on service quality of network elements or resources. Some of the warnings indicate that network elements are recovered from a fault.	Maintenance personnel can know the running status of the network and network elements by viewing info alarms. Info alarms can be handled according to the site condition.

Alarm Status

Alarm status indicates the acknowledging status of the alarms, which can be acknowledged and unacknowledged. The acknowledged state indicates that alarms have been handled.

Acknowledged: indicates that the alarm has been handled by users.
Unacknowledged: indicates that the alarm has not been handled by users.

Alarm Type

Alarms are divided into the following types by property:

Communication alarm
Indicates the failure of communication between devices, network devices and eReplication, and two sets of eReplication.
Environmental alarm
Indicates License, VMs or communication faults.
NE alarm
Indicates physical resource faults.
QoS alarm
Indicates service quality deterioration.
Processing error alarm
Indicates software faults or incorrect fault handling procedures.
Security alarm
Indicate security problems of the NMS and network elements.

Alarm Management

Alarm statistics
You can search for the network elements' current alarms of different severities on the NMS, and know how to handle alarms by viewing the alarm details on the NMS.
Alarm notification
The NMS provides multiple alarm notification methods (by short message, email, or sound). The NMS sends alarm notifications to specified mobile phones or email addresses, or notifies the maintenance personnel of alarms through the built-in sound system of clients. This improves the troubleshooting timeliness and efficiency.
Alarm dump
This function dumps the historical alarms to a file in a specified folder, improving the NMS performance.
Auxiliary alarm functions
You can use the alarm acknowledgement mechanism to check whether alarms are handled in a timely manner. You can manually acknowledge and unacknowledge alarms, and clear acknowledged alarms from the current alarm list. In addition, you can add handling suggestions for each alarm. In other words, you can record the experiences in locating, analyzing, and handling alarms in the alarm knowledge repository, helping other administrators know the operations that have been done to the alarms and sharing maintenance experiences with other administrators.

Alarm Notification

eReplication supports the following alarm notification methods:

Email
This method notifies maintenance personnel of alarms by email. Alarm notifications are sent to specified email addresses. Maintenance personnel can know alarm information by viewing emails.
Short message
This method notifies maintenance personnel of alarms by short message. Alarm notifications are sent to the mobile phone numbers of maintenance personnel through the short message service (SMS) provided by the service provider or the SMS modem connected to the NMS server. Maintenance personnel can know the alarm information by viewing short messages.
Sound
This method notifies maintenance personnel of alarms by sound. Once an alarm is generated, the built-in sound system of clients plays alarm sound. After hearing the sound, maintenance personnel can check the alarm received by the NMS server.