Cisco Cisco Prime Optical 9.6 White Paper

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White Paper

Cisco Prime Optical and Alarm Profile Deployment

Network Device Alarms

An alarm is an indication of an anomaly in a network device. If the network device is connected to other devices in

a network, problems with it could cause an impairment in the network. Alarms can also be caused by situations

such as improper removal of line cards, misconfiguration and operations outside the normal range.

Alarm Management Challenges

The operating software in network devices is very sophisticated. Network devices monitor traffic flow, chassis and

line cards, internal and external environmental conditions, and many points of performance measurement.

Each of these network devices come with a list of alarms that it can generate with a perceived severity. This is

called a default alarm profile; in SONET this is based on Telcordia GR-474-CORE, and default alarm profiles are

available to every customer that owns and operates the devices.

Network operators usually build a unique network that suits their business objectives, so network operators do not

need or desire all of the alarms in the network devices.

There are several challenges to managing alarms in devices and networks; following are two of them:

●

Changing some of the alarms in the default alarm profile from “Reported” to “Not Reported” or changing the
alarm status from a higher level to a lower level (for example, “Critical” to “Major” or “Minor”) or vice versa.

●

Deploying the newly created customized alarm profile network wide on devices of the same type.

There are two reserved alarm profiles that come with ONS15xxx Cisco

Transport Controller-based devices:

●

Default: The Default alarm profile list contains alarm and condition severities that correspond when

applicable to default values established in Telcordia GR-474-CORE.

●

Inherited: The reserved inherited profile allows port alarm severities to be governed by card-level severities

or card alarm severities to be determined by the node-level severities.

Up to 10 profiles, including the two reserved profiles (Inherited and Default) can be stored in the devices.

The default profile and inherited profile are reserved by the network element and cannot be edited. They must first

be loaded on the devices and cloned, and the clone can then be edited for customization.

Cisco Prime

™

Optical has features that help to create customized alarm profiles and deploy them to all ONS15xxx

devices that support alarm profiles with a few clicks.

Note: Validate your alarm profile changes in the lab before deploying them on a live network.