Patent ID: 7206972

Claim:
A method of identifying service critical faults in a communications network comprising: a. receiving alarm information from field installed communications network equipment; b. updating operational states of managed entity instances corresponding to the failed network infrastructure to reflect the unavailability thereof; c. propagating operational state information associated with a group of low-level managed entity instances to at least one high-level managed entity instance; and d. identifying high-level managed entity instances experiencing service critical failures; e. receiving route path tracing information generated in troubleshooting connection establishment; f. updating route path tracing states of the managed entity instances corresponding to network infrastructure encountered in a traced route path to reflect route path trace states thereof; g. propagating route path tracing state information associated with a low-level managed entity instance to at least one high-level managed entity instances; and h. identifying high-level managed entity instances experiencing critical route path tracing failures; i. displaying iconical representations of the identified high-level managed entities experiencing critical route path tracing failures, wherein propagating operational state information from the group of low-level managed entity instances to the at least one high-level managed entity, the high-level managed entity operational state being set to correspond to a failure if each low-level managed entity instance in the group of low-level managed entity instances is experiencing a failure, and wherein displaying iconical representations of the identified high-level managed entities experiencing critical route path tracing failures, the method further comprises a step of: employing a route path tracing failure reporting scheme; wherein employing the route path tracing failure reporting scheme, the method further comprises a step of: ascribing a route path tracing state from: “in path”, “in alternate path”, “interrupted”, “available”, “needs repair”, “rejected”, and “not considered”.