Patent ID: 7213179

Claim:
A method comprising: capturing error codes associated with detected outages in a storage medium located in a network processing device; and automatically classifying the error codes into software caused outages and hardware caused outages; and automatically classifying the software caused outages as: planned outages that are user-directed and occur according to a predefined outage schedule, the planned outages associated with scheduled maintenance; first unplanned outages that are user-directed but occur independently of the predefined outage schedule, the first unplanned outages corresponding to manually initiated resets, manually initiated reloads and manually initiated processor-switchovers that are manually initiated during unscheduled maintenance; and second unplanned outages that occur independently of manually initiated resets, manually initiated reloads and manually initiated processor-switchover and occur independently of the predefined outage schedule, the second unplanned outages associated with device-disabling software errors; and outputting a representation of the classifications.