A method and apparatus for triaging alarms transmitting from monitored entities in a network is provided. A relative importance value and a health value are maintained for each of one or more monitored entities. A monitored entity may be any hardware or software component that is capable of issuing an alarm. In response to receiving an alarm at a monitoring device, a triage value is determined based on both the relative importance value and the health value for the monitored entity associated with the received alarm. The triage value reflects any dependencies that the monitored entity that issued the alarm shares with another monitored entities. The triage value also reflects the current operational status of the monitored entity that issued the alarm. The monitoring device may determine an order in which the one or more received alarms should be addressed based on the triage value associated with each alarm.
