Discovering rules for fault management

At the heart of the Internet revolution is global telecommunication systems. These systems, initially designed for voice traffic, provide the vast backbone bandwidth capabilities necessary for Internet traffic. They have built-in redundancy and complexity to ensure robustness and quality of service. To facilitate this, requires complex fault identification and management systems. Fault identification and management is generally handled by reducing the amount of alarm events (symptoms) presented to the operating engineer through monitoring, filtering and masking. The ultimate goal is to determine and present the actual underlying fault. While en-route to automated fault identification, it is useful to derive rules and techniques to attempt to present less symptoms with greater diagnostic assistance. With these objectives in mind, computer-assisted human discovery and human-assisted computer discovery techniques are discussed.