Fault management

In network management, fault management is the set of functions that detect, isolate, and correct malfunctions in a telecommunications network, compensate for environmental changes, and include maintaining and examining error logs, accepting and acting on error detection notifications, tracing and identifying faults, carrying out sequences of diagnostics tests, correcting faults, reporting error conditions, and localizing and tracing faults by examining and manipulating database information. When a fault or event occurs, a network component will often send a notification to the network operator using a protocol such as SNMP. An alarm is a persistent indication of a fault that clears only when the triggering condition has been resolved. A current list of problems occurring on the network component is often kept in the form of an active alarm list such as is defined in RFC 3877, the Alarm MIB. A list of cleared faults is also maintained by most network management systems. Fault management systems may use complex filtering systems to assign alarms to severity levels. These can range in severity from debug to emergency, as in the syslog protocol. Alternatively, they could use the ITU X