User Guide

1-5
Cisco AlarmTracker Client User Guide
OL-1501-01
Chapter 1 AlarmTracker Client Introduction
Overview
Alarms
The AlarmTracker Client (AlarmTracker) application primarily deals with the
display and management of Alarm objects. Before going on too much farther, it
is important to understand what the definition of an Alarm object is.
The Event that signals that an object has failed or is unavailable is called an
Alarm. This Event raises a condition for the object. The condition might be that a
specific object is offline, unavailable, or has failed. A subsequent Event might
report that the object has returned to normal function. This second Event clears
the condition.
There are two basic states for an Alarm object:
• the down or raised state which indicates a problem
• the up or cleared state which indicates that the object is OK
In addition to displaying the current state (and history) of Alarm objects,
AlarmTracker allows a customer support team to actively manage Alarms.
AlarmTracker can be used to assign Alarm objects so that other support
representatives can be aware the someone is working on a particular Alarm.
The assignment status of each Alarm becomes part of each Alarms overall state.
This status indicates what the TAC is doing about the Alarm object. It indicates
that the Alarm has or has not been acknowledged by a support representative, and
the Alarm can indicate who assigned the Alarm and who it was assigned to.
In addition, AlarmTracker can tie the Alarm to an external trouble ticket
management system by means of the Ticket ID field. This makes it easier to move
back and forth from the AlarmTracker application to the trouble ticket system.
Each Alarm object is comprised of one or more Events. These Events make up the
set of state transitions for the Alarm object. The first Event is the raise condition
which creates the Alarm object. From there, the Alarm either closes itself if a clear
Event is received for it, or other Events may be received related to the Alarm. For
example, a user may Assign or Exclude the Alarm, and repeat raise Events may
be received for the Alarm. An example of a series of Events received for a
particular Alarm is shown in Figure 1-3.