Patent ID: 7636424

Claim:
A method for presenting an alert in a communications network that includes a plurality of network components that enable connection of devices on the network, the method comprising: receiving an alert associated with a network component; identifying all alerts associated with the network component, wherein the network component is identified by querying a first data structure associating network components with alert identifiers and a second data structure that stores alerts and associates the alerts with network components based on the identified network component; determining which of the all alerts relate to problems that currently affect customer service versus those that require attention of a user but that do not currently affect customer service, thereby defining a set of customer-service-affecting (CSA) alerts and non-customer-service-affecting alerts; assigning a priority level to each CSA alert within the set of customer-service-affecting alerts based on one or more predetermined criteria; ranking the alerts based on priority level to determine a most important alert; and automatically presenting the most important alert to the user without user intervention.