Alarms and Events Overview

Alarms provide information pertaining to a system's operational condition that a network manager may need to act upon. An alarm might represent a change in an external condition, for example, a communications link has changed from connected to disconnected state. Alarms can have these severities:

Critical application error
Major application error
Minor application error
Cleared

An alarm is considered inactive once it has been cleared and cleared alarms are logged on the Alarms & Events, and then View History page.

Events note the occurrence of an expected condition, such as an unsuccessful login attempt by a user. Events have a severity of Info and are logged on the View History page.

Note:

Some events may be throttled because the frequently generated events can overload the MP or OAM server's system or event history log (for example, generating an event for every ingress message failure). By specifying a throttle interval (in seconds), the events display no more than once during the interval duration period (for example, if the throttle interval is 5 seconds, the event is logged no more than once every 5 seconds).

Figure 4-1 shows how Alarms and Events are organized in the application.

Figure 4-1 Flow of Alarms

Alarms and events are recorded in a database log table. Application event logging provides an efficient way to record event instance information in a manageable form, and is used to:

Record events representing alarmed conditions
Record events for later browsing
Implement an event interface for generating SNMP traps

Alarm indicators, located in the User Interface banner, indicate all critical, major, and minor active alarms. A number and an alarm indicator combined represent the number of active alarms at a specific level of severity. For example, if you see the number six in the orange-colored alarm indicator, it means there are six major active alarms. This is shown in Figure 4-2 and Figure 4-3.

Figure 4-2 Alarm Indicators Legend

Figure 4-3 Trap Count Indicator Legend