A Generic Model for Fault Isolation in Integrated Management Systems

Abstract

Distributed systems in enterprises as well as telecommunication environments strongly demand more automated fault management. A single fault in these complex systems might cause a huge number of symptomatic error messages and side effects to occur. The common root faults for these symptoms have to be identified to start fault removal procedures as soon as possible and to decrease system down-time. This paper presents a methodology for fault isolation in integrated management systems. A generic model is described that unifies the view of the management system on the managed environment. It integrates the relevant aspects of network, system, and service management layers in order to perform integrated fault isolation. Our approach is based on a general dependency graph model. It captures the information that is required to determine the root cause of a fault on the one hand, and the set of fault affected services and customers on the other hand. The layered TMN architecture serves as an example for an integrated management environment throughout this paper.