Patent ID: 7415637

Claim:
A method of displaying a cause of a trouble in a network, the method comprising: displaying a model network in which the network is modeled by a combination of network apparatuses and their connections; inputting information of a trouble portion in the model network and a trouble symptom of the trouble portion; retrieving, from an instance database using the input trouble portion and the input trouble symptom as retrieval keys, an instance record, the instance database in which at least the trouble portion, the trouble symptom of the trouble portion, a cause portion of the trouble, and a frequency of the trouble in the past are registered; displaying the cause of the trouble based on the cause portion and the frequency of the trouble in the instance record retrieved from the instance database; registering at least a similar portion and the trouble symptom of the similar portion in a similarity group database; retrieving, from the similarity group database using the input trouble portion and the input trouble symptom, a particular trouble portion and a particular trouble symptom; and adding the particular trouble portion and the particular trouble symptom retrieved from the similarity group database to the retrieval keys for retrieving the instance record.