Patent ID: 7542428

Claim:
A method of tracking and reporting services outages in a communications services system, comprising: performing real-time monitoring, from a head end of a communications services system, of communications at voice ports of a plurality of customer locations; detecting a loss of communications at voice ports at customer locations in a given service area; routing to a processing center alarms from voice ports containing information associated with the detected loss of communications; storing information from the alarms associated with the detected loss of communications at the voice ports; processing the information from the alarms associated with the detected loss of communications at the voice ports to aggregate the alarms having information associated with the detected loss of communications at the voice ports; determining whether a number of aggregated alarms in the given service area received during a threshold time period exceeds an alarm threshold representing a service outage event; and when the number of aggregated alarms in the given service area received during a threshold time period exceeds an alarm threshold, providing at a remotely accessible graphical display of the communications services system, information associated with the service outage event and the associated voice ports.