Patent ID: 8509093

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, over a network including a plurality of sites, a plurality of alarms identifying alarm-related information associated with failures of network elements and failures of links between the network elements associated with one or more of the sites; creating, from the alarm-related information, a first table including: a list of different types of the links with which the alarms are associated wherein the different types correspond to multiple Digital Signal Levels, an aggregated number of the plurality of alarms associated with each of the different type of the listed links, a list of the sites with which the alarms are associated, and an aggregated number of the plurality of alarms associated with each of the listed sites; determining that a potential outage has occurred based on an analysis of at least a portion of the alarm-related information with respect to a threshold value for an unavailable link equivalent corresponding to a particular amount of bandwidth, wherein the at least a portion of the alarm-related information includes at least one of: an amount of unavailable bandwidth per unit time, or a number of unavailable links per unit time; analyzing whether the potential outage is a false outage by determining that a probe, used to generate at least one of the plurality of alarms, has failed based on the at least one of the plurality of alarms indicating a failure of the probe; and providing a notification including: the first table, and an indication of whether the potential outage corresponds to an outage that has occurred or the potential outage is a false outage.