Consolidate Network Monitoring Data with an Alarm Monitoring System

Network Alarm Monitoring Systems are devices, typically centrally located, that monitor equipment at your sites for notable events – otherwise referred to as "alarms". An alarm can refer to something as simple or mundane as an unlocked door, or it could mean that your equipment is failing and you're about to suffer a massive network outage. Your Alarm Monitoring System, if it's any good, should organize and interpret the severity of incoming alarms, helping you coordinate maintenance and repair efforts throughout your network. It is an essential part of any network management system.

What are "alarms"?

Equipment at your sites is expected to operate without you watching it 24/7. As events occur that might require your attention, errors, failures, or general maintenance issues, your equipment will let you know by reporting an alarm. If the device is either incapable of reporting the alarm, or you'd like to monitor alarms in a different way, you can connect a remote telemetry unit (RTU) to the equipment at your site to report alarms, but the effect is the same: network equipment reports alarms when things go wrong.

The NetGuardian RTU collects alarms and sends notifications for its discrete alarms, analog threshold alarms, and ping targets. It can also communicate with multiple master stations

Alarms don't necessarily have to be specific to any one piece of equipment either. For example, you could monitor a temperature sensor at your site. As the temperature gets too high, it may set an alarm, indicating that the air conditioning didn't kick on and that your equipment is in danger of being damaged by heat. While not directly indicating a problem with your equipment, failure to respond to an alarm of this sort will likely furnish the same result: equipment failures and network outages.

While many of these devices can report alarms directly to you, receiving individual alerts for network problems may leave you overwhelmed and confused. As your network grows, both geographically and in number of elements, you may struggle to track of all the network information coming your way, and waste time and energy attempting to determine the severity and location of individual point references.

The Alarm Monitoring System Helps You Manage Your Network

Ideally, your alarm monitoring system should:

1. Collect allincoming alarms
2. Organize incoming alarms
3. Send intelligible notifications for alarms to technicians
4. Provide a simple interface for a network manager to execute controls and otherwise monitor the network

Your alarm monitoring system won't be very helpful if it leaves blind-spots in your network. It must be able to collect all of your network alarms. Therefore, it must be able to communicate using all of the protocols used in your network. (And it should probably support any future protocols you have plans to employ.) An alarm monitoring system like T/Mon, from DPS Telecom, supports a wide variety of network protocols, including legacy and proprietary protocols, making it supremely adaptable to your network needs. If you want to consolidate monitoring to a single platform, you can employ a device like T/Mon as a regional or mid-level manager to mediate multiple protocols to SNMP or TL1, for a higher level master station.

T/Mon can receive SNMP Traps and poll legacy/proprietary devices to bring all of your network monitoring on to one platform. It can even forward SNMP traps to a higher level master.

The Alarm Collector

In some cases, the alarm monitoring system is simply a device that listens for alarms and collects them via a terminal session or a text log. While this does collect all of your alarms in a central location, it is minimally helpful.

While discrete contacts and analog threshold alarms can be designated to provide an indication of their severity on site, they don't necessarily indicate severity within the network. Your alarm monitoring system should provide some means to sort alarms by perceived severity and even ways to determine the most important alarms within your network. Often times, this is still done by a human operator – no device can make more informed decisions about your network than you can – however, your alarm manager should at least help you out in this regard. For example, T/Mon, the alarm monitoring system from DPS Telecom, allows you to sort alarms by severity, location, and other factors, as you see fit. In monitoring mode, alarms are color coded indicating severity, so you can see quickly what your highest priority (alarms labeled "critical") alarms are.

The new "root alarm" feature for T/Mon takes this a step further, helping you weed out irrelevant alarms when a large number of alarms set. For example, if your DS3 fails, a large number of irrelevant T1 points will set alarms. The root alarm feature allows you to designate the DS3 as a "root," and so, when the DS3 failure alarm sets, any T1 points are automatically silenced, saving you the trouble of weeding through nuisance alarms to figure out the real problem. Of course, when any T1 alarm goes off by itself, T/Mon will allow the alarm to occur normally. Your alarm monitoring system should not simply provide visibility, but intelligent visibility for your network.

Dispatching Technicians Automatically with Adequate Notifications

As your alarm monitoring system collects alarms, it should be able to notify technicians of new developments. This saves your network operations center (NOC) from having to dispatch each individual alarm, and reduces the likelihood that an alarm will somehow be forgotten between the NOC and remote technicians.

T/Mon, for example, can send email, text, pager, and, with an accessory, voice notification to technicians for any of the unit's databased alarms. You can even set progressive notifications, so that if the primary technician for a site/alarm is notified and fails to acknowledge the alarm, the notification rolls-over to the next technician down the line, ensuring that no alarm falls through. Properly organized notifications essentially automate dispatching duties, and ensure that your network maintenance and repair issues are resolved with the utmost efficiency.

Finally, your Alarm monitoring system should provide an interface that is as easy to use as possible. Most alarm managers provide a simple terminal interface – which is good. The terminal interface provides powerful access to your alarm manager, and is quickly navigated, provided the user knows all of the terminal commands and has intricate knowledge of your network. However, expecting all of your technicians to achieve the extremely high level of proficiency required by a terminal program for your alarm monitoring system is unrealistic. Your alarm monitoring systems should provide some sort of interface that your technicians can make quick use of, without an overbearing amount of training or a weighty manual.

T/GFX, the geographical interface for T/Mon does this by placing all of your network resources on a map, and allowing the user to perform databasing and monitoring operations with a simple point-and-click interface. Placing all of your alarms on a map helps technicians determine where problems are at a glance and prevents users from having to remember complicated point references for sites. T/GFX allows users to "drill-down" through map layers as well, to get a closer view of sections of your network, all the way down to the floor plan at your sites. Using the interface, you can even operate controls or access the interfaces for your alarmed devices directly through the map, greatly simplifying alarm and network management.

The Graphical interface for T/Mon provides a map-based interface for all of your sites, from your network at large, all the way down to the floor plan at your sites. T/GFX also displays a site directory, standing/COS alarms, trouble logs, and text messages all on the same screen.

Your alarm monitoring system exists to help you consolidate network alarms and make managing your network easier. Don't settle for something that doesn't provide the visibility you need, or something that overcomplicates your administrative efforts. Get an alarm master that provides the features and interface you need to manage your network.

Related Topics:
Remote Monitoring Software