Patent ID: 7864687

Claim:
A fault management system for a provider communication network, comprising: a fault reporting interface for receiving reports of communication failures affecting elements of a customer network served by the provider communication network; one or more network interface elements for retrieving information from and directing commands to designated elements of the provider communication network; and a failure analysis module operative to perform automated analysis of the provider communication network in order to diagnose a reported communication failure, the failure analysis module querying the provider communication network so as to diagnose whether the reported communication failure is caused by a border gateway protocol failure, querying the provider communication network including identifying a customer location reporting a problem and a router serving the customer location, and examining traffic statistics for the router serving the customer location to determine if the traffic statistics indicate an increase in traffic over a prescribed interval; wherein the failure analysis module is operative to respond to a reported communication failure by direction prescribed port failure diagnostics if the traffic statistics indicate improper port performance; wherein the failure analysis module is operative, if the traffic statistics indicate correct port performance, to evaluate border gateway protocol status for each customer IP address representing a logical channel on a physical circuit serving the customer station reporting a communication failure and reporting a border gateway protocol status failure if an unsatisfactory status is returned for one or more logical channels; and wherein the failure analysis module is operative, upon establishing satisfactory border gateway protocol status for all logical channels, to direct a test communication over each logical channel and to direct evaluation of network configuration if one or more test communications fails.