How does the NSP manage alarms?

NSP fault management

The NSP provides alarm monitoring, correlation, and troubleshooting for the most unhealthy NEs in the network. Filter alarm lists, identify root causes, and determine alarm impacts.

The alarm lists display all alarms against NEs in your network. The lists can be filtered and sorted in a variety of ways to reduce the number of visible alarm messages to a manageable number. Open an alarm list from a specific NE to view alarms only for that NE. There are three categories of alarm lists, available from the drop-down list:

• The current alarm list displays all active alarms in the network, or for specific NEs. The global current alarm list is kept updated in real-time. Current alarm lists accessed from the Top Unhealthy NEs or Top Problems views are updated on demand.

• The merged alarm list displays all active and previously-active alarms in the network (or for specific NEs) over a specified time period.

• The historical alarm list displays all previously-active alarms in the network (or for specific NEs) over a specified time period.

Alarm severity levels

The NSP supports the following alarm severity levels:

• Cleared

• Indeterminate

• Info

• Condition

• Warning

• Minor

• Major

• Critical

Alarm severity levels are color-coded. An administrator can change the colors assigned to each severity level; see the NSP System Administrator Guide for information about modifying alarm severity colors. You can manually change the severity of an alarm, or configure the NSP to change the severity of an alarm when it is received; see How do I automate alarm management using a policy?.

Role-based access control for alarms

Alarm-related navigation actions require write or execute access to the object affected by the alarm. Opening an NE Session requires execute access to the corresponding NE.

Role-based access is not supported on the historical and merged alarms lists, or on historical alarm REST and RESTCONF requests, which may show alarms outside of a user’s assigned role. Role-based access for optical trail alarms is only supported in deployments that include the NRC-X.

Alarm reload behavior

When alarm messages from MDM and WS-NOC sources are modified or deleted in NSP, the change is recorded in the NSP database, but not at the alarm source. If alarms are bulk-reloaded from an MDM or WS-NOC source to the NSP, previously modified or deleted alarms from that source are handled in the following manner:

• For alarms with modified fields, any data already in the NSP database is not overwritten by the reloaded alarm.

• Alarms in the NSP database that are tagged as Transient (i.e., not standing alarms) are not deleted by the reload, even if they are no longer present on the source system.