FAULT MONITORING

摘要

Faults occurring in a telecommunications system (21) are monitored identifying their time of onset and reporting them to an operator through an interface (16) if they have not cleared within a predetermined interval. Transient faults, which do clear within that interval, are not reported directly, but only if such faults occur more frequently than a predetermined rate. This is determined by establishing a scan interval, and an analysis period equal to a plurality of scan intervals, monitoring the system (21) continuously for the occurrences of faults, and storing their times of occurrence in a store (8). At the end of each scan interval, the number of occurrences of the fault during the analysis period which ends at the end of the scan interval are counted by a counter (11). If the number of occurrences of the fault in the analysis period is equal to or greater than a threshold value selected by user input (16), an alarm indicator (17) is activated. This allows isolated transient faults to be disregarded, allowing the user to concentrate on recurrent intermittent faults.