Effective Telco Alarm Monitoring Helps You Manage Your Network

Telco alarms are notifications for problems indicated by telco equipment, typically weighted by importance as critical, major, or minor designations. These problems are normally related to failures in the chassis – high temperatures, fans breaking down, and other hardware issues.

What is a Telco Alarm?

Telco alarms are generally monitored by discrete contacts, small contact closures that issue a burst of voltage when an alarm condition is present. Discrete alarms only provide binary reporting functionality, but your telco equipment will generally have discrete outputs that each designate alarm severities, providing another dimension to help you determine which alarms most require your attention.

These discrete contacts are monitored by a remote telemetry unit (RTU), a device that sits inline with your telco equipment and reports alarms as they occur. The RTU serves as your eyes, ears, and, occasionally, hands at your remote sites, keeping you up to date on problems throughout your network. Sophisticated RTUs, like the NetGuardian 864A can monitor up to 64 discrete telco alarms per unit, with expansions available to increase capacity, so you can monitor even your largest remote sites.

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

The RTU should be able to send notification for alarms. Some RTUs will report to a log file, requiring the user or a third party program to weed through terminal entries to determine when there's a problem. Better RTUs will send notifications for alarms. The NetGuardian series from DPS Telecom can send notification for alarms via email, pager, or text, so when a telco alarm sets occurs, they can keep track of goings-on in the network directly from a smartphone or laptop, and don't have to wait for dispatch from the Network Operations Center (NOC). NetGuardian RTUs also offer an easy-to-use web interface, for easy operation, so technicians can access detailed alarm information from their laptop, smartphone, or any device with access to the RTU via the internet or your intranet.

Additional Monitoring/Control Options Supplament Telco Alarm Monitoring

To supplement telco alarms, some RTUs offer analog inputs and control relays. Analog inputs allow technicians to measure conditions that might affect the equipment without directly monitoring the equipment. Analog sensors typically report four alarm thresholds, major and minor, over and under, and are used to monitor conditions such as temperature. If, for example, you were to set a minor over threshold at just above the set point for air conditioning equipment at your site, and you received that minor over alarm, it would mean that your HVAC equipment is malfunctioning. While this doesn't indicate an alarm from your equipment directly, it does indicate a condition that could potentially affect your telco equipment.

Control relays are simple circuits wired to your telco equipment to perform functions remotely. Control relays perform on-off functionality and help you avoid making a trip to your site to perform minor maintenance duties. You can even derive control relays to operate based on your telco alarms and analog threshold alarms, so when an alarm condition occurs, your RTU can handle the problem without bothering you. If, for example, you had an analog sensor monitoring fuel for a primary generator at one of your telco sites, you could derive a control such that when the analog sensor set an alarm for low fuel in the primary generator, it would power on the secondary generator automatically, keeping your telco site powered and operational without bothering you about it.

The NetGuardian's control relays can be operated from the unit's web interface or from a master station (the T/Mon SLIM in the diagram above) with access to the NetGuardian.

Getting All of Your Telco Alarms on One Screen

Because telco networks are generally large and incorporate a number of sites, which you'll have monitored by RTUs, you'll likely want a master station to incorporate all of your telco alarm and other monitoring information in to a single interface. The master station will save you the trouble of having to associate a point reference with a site whenever you receive an alarm – the master should do it all for you, providing a more complete view of your network at any given time than you could possibly have by monitoring a number of RTUs individually.

A strong master station, like T/Mon, will bring in your telco alarms from sources under any available protocols. Whether you're working with equipment in legacy or proprietary protocols, T/Mon will capture all of your telco alarms, so you can keep all of your alarms on one screen.

T/Mon can recieve alarms from any protocol in use in your network, legacy, proprietary, or otherwise.

Outside of that, your telco alarm master should provide notifications for alarms, and an easy-to-use interface to simplify alarm management. T/Mon can send notifications for any of the alarms you collect via email, text, pager, or with the SiteDialer accessory, voice. You can even setup progressive notifications, so if the primary technician for a particular site or alarm fails to acknowledge an alarm, T/Mon will notify the next person down the line, and so on. As technicians acknowledge alarms, the NOC will know where the technician is headed and can help ensure that technicians don't overlap in attempting to deal with alarms. These sorts of notifications help you ensure that your telco network is maintained and repaired quickly and efficiently, whenever a problem occurs.

Your telco alarm master should also employ a reasonably easy to use interface, to make monitoring alarms simple enough for any lay-user in the NOC to understand. Many master stations provide a simple terminal interface. These interfaces are powerful, and quick to navigate, but generally require intricate knowledge of your telco network and a great deal of training. Novice users won't be able to help you effectively manage your network. Better master stations employ a graphical interface, something that displays alarms in an intuitive way, both reducing errors and allowing more users to monitor the network.

T/Mon does this with the T/GFX interface. T/GFX displays your telco alarms on a map, so when an alarm sets, you can see exactly where the problem is. The map-based interface also allows users to "drill-down" from higher levels of the map (your network at large) all the way down to the floorplan view at your sites, so that there's no mistaking the location of an alarm. On one screen, T/GFX consolidates trouble tickets, text messages, and a list of standing alarms as well, so a technician accessing the program can instantly see all available information associated with any of your telco alarms.

Telco alarms don't have to be hard to manage. With the right RTUs and the right telco alarm master, you can keep track of network failures when and where they occur, increasing maintenance efficiency and reducing the likelihood or duration of network downtime.