Patent ID: 7733767

Claim:
A system for correlating alarms from a plurality of network elements NEs in a telecommunications network, the system comprising: a client NE and a serving NE which depend on each other in such way that if the serving NE fails, then the client NE will fail to provide its services as a consequence, the serving NE being configured to signal traffic messages to the client NE without providing information on a faulty hardware or software unit in the traffic messages; and a network management system structured to supervise the client and serving NEs and to receive and store alarms from the client and serving NEs, wherein the serving NE comprises: means for generating a fault identifier (FID) related to the faulty hardware or software unit; means for forwarding an alarm message to the network management system and including therein the FID; and means for providing the traffic message with the same FID to the client NE, wherein the client NE comprises: means for extracting the FID from the traffic message from the serving NE and appending the extracted FID to a service alarm message expressing a service fault; and means for forwarding the service alarm message to the network management system, and the network management system receives separately the alarm message from the serving NE and the service alarm message from the client NE.