ABSTRACT
Events occur and conditions causing alarms arise spontaneously in all systems. Some of these need to be brought to an operator’s attention, some need to be logged for later review, some need to be passed to monitoring and analysis equipment (the “P” for performance in FCAPS) and many can be ignored. The handling of a particular alarm may change from minute to minute: perhaps an operator is trying to pin down an elusive fault and wants to be alerted as soon as it occurs, perhaps a particular fault is only important on certain days or if another fault has not also recently occurred.
