User guide

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Cisco Media Gateway Manager 5.0 User Guide
OL-5461-02
Chapter 9 Managing Faults
Is the Service Working?
9.3.2 Suppressing Alarms
Suppressing alarms prevents alarms from appearing on the Cisco MGX Alarm or History tab or on any
other clients. Alarms are suppressed when the NE is under maintenance. See 5.3.1 Changing the
Operational State of an NE.
9.4 Is the Service Working?
Network devices will report symptoms of problems by generating events. An event in this context is a
message indicating that a device or application in your network has discovered something of note. The
network devices will generate many types of events automatically.
In addition, you can use thresholds to define or modify the conditions under which events are generated.
A threshold is a trigger, set up on a continuous data stream, that is a point of interest that generates events
when that point is satisfied.
The events generated need to be analyzed to determine whether they represent a fault condition or
problem in your network.
It is important to generate events when there is a problem in the EMS. It is also important to limit the
number of events generated to prevent an excessive load on the network. The EMS performs a number
of self-monitoring tasks where threshold limits can be set. The threshold limits are set in the Self
Monitor Table. If one of these thresholds is crossed, then an EMS alarm will be generated.
The user can obtain information regarding how the system is performing and how long certain tasks are
taking to complete by selecting Administration > Control Panel then Alarm Configuration >
Threshold EMS Alarms or Alarm Configuration > Non-Threshold EMS Alarms. (See 9.4.3 Setting
Up and Viewing Alarm Configuration Parameters.) By monitoring this data, you can identify potential
system problems before they become critical in the operation of the EMS. Associated with each
parameter that is monitored are three alarm thresholds. The administrator can set a minor, major, and
critical threshold value for each parameter. If any of these thresholds are crossed, then an alarm will be
raised to provide notification of the situation.
Threshold alarms are raised when their limit exceeds the value set for Critical, Major, Minor, or Warning
thresholds. For example, you can set threshold alarms for disk usage for 90%, 80%, 70%, and 60%,
meaning a warning alarm is raised when the disk becomes 61% full and a critical alarm is raised when
the disk becomes 91% full. The server checks these parameters at every polling interval that is set in the
Poll Frequency field.
Non-threshold alarms do not have an alarm threshold. Instead, non-threshold alarms occur when a
condition occurs, such as loss of connectivity to an NE. Use the Non-Threshold EMS Alarms tab to set
the severity level (critical, major, minor, or warning) for which a non-threshold alarm should be raised
when that condition occurs.
Caution Changing the EMS alarm severities can affect the alarm status seen by listeners on the EMS's OSS
interfaces.
The following sections provide information on network elements:
• 9.4.1 Viewing Service Status
• 9.4.2 Viewing Alarms
• 9.4.3 Setting Up and Viewing Alarm Configuration Parameters