Patent ID: 7437762

Claim:
A method for processing alarms, that have been triggered by a monitoring system, comprising the steps of: a) entering alarms triggered by a monitoring system into an alarm log; b) evaluating similarity between the alarms; c) grouping similar alarms into alarm clusters; d) creating generalized alarms that cover the clustered alarms, the step of creating generalized alarms including copying the alarm log to a cluster log and for each alarm in the cluster log, repeating the following steps, e1) counting the number of covered alarms to include alarms that are equal to or more specific than the generalized alarm; e2) if the number of covered alarms exceeds a predetermined minimum number, then terminate repeating and forward said generalized alarm for further processing; e3) selecting, based on a heuristic, an attribute of the alarms in the cluster log; and e4) for each alarm of a cluster log replacing the selected attribute by a more general attribute; and e5) returning to step e1).