Author: David McGee

Introduction

It is important to note that one of the popular functions of the IDMS platform is automatic ticket generation, from incoming alarms. Varying trap rules are in place to create tickets automatically from alarms that do not clear themselves in a certain period of time. This can vary by vendor, severity and equipment type. Rules have been fine-tuned over the last decade or so on some of our customers' systems to create a good baseline.

The SNMP Manager interacts with the Ticketer application in order to automatically create tickets from incoming alarms based on service level agreement timeframes set our by our customers. This is often based on alarm severity: Critical, Major, Minor, Warning, etc. Tickets do not create for 'Informational' or cosmetic alarms from telecoms systems, by default.

Relevant Domains/Database Tables

SNMP Manager

• NetworkElement
• ActiveAlarm
• RemoteTicket
• TrapRule

Ticketer

• Ticket

Class Diagram

Check out the class diagram below, and let a colleague know if you have any questions regarding this process! Feel free to get in touch with myself (Dave), also!

Trap Rules - Automatic Ticket Creation Examples

The logic for triggering ticket creation based on incoming alarms can be customised in a trap rule for a specific vendor/equipment type. Our trap rules are written in Groovy. Please see some screenshots of the important pieces of these rules, in relation to automatic ticket creation.

ADC/TE Spectrum

SOLID

TEKO

Internal Errigal Watchdog

The ticketCreationDelay values are set in seconds. As you can see, there are similarities between the rules shown. Sometimes this depends on the customer's expectations. Increasing the ticketCreationDelay timeframes can result in a less noisy Ticketer environment for NOC engineers to work through. However, the right balance must be found to enable fast responses with telecoms equipment issues that need to be resolved quickly. You can see that internal errigal watchdog alarms generate tickets from alarms immediately! (0 value)

Self-assessment questions

On a QA environment:

1. Try find out how many remote tickets exist on the SNMP Manager database?
2. How many tickets exist on the ticketer database?
3. Briefly ask a colleague about manual ticket generation. How does this compare to automatic ticket creation?
4. How many remote tickets exist for active alarms that are still active? (cleared=false)
5. Are there many active alarms (that are still cleared=false) that do not have remote tickets? (Could indicate an issue, or could relate to the alarm severity - there may not be an issue!)