The present document is part of a TS-family covering the 3rd Generation Partnership Project: Technical Specification Group Services and System Aspects; Telecommunication management; as identified below: The present document is part of a set of TSs which describes the requirements and information model necessary for the Telecommunication Management (TM) of 3GPP systems. The TM principles and TM architecture are specified in TS 32.101 and TS 32.102. A 3GPP system is composed of a multitude of Network Elements (NE) of various types and, typically, different vendors inter-operate in a co-ordinated manner in order to satisfy the network users' communication requirements. The occurrence of failures in a NE may cause a deterioration of this NE's function and/or service quality and will, in severe cases, lead to the complete unavailability of the NE. In order to minimize the effects of such failures on the Quality of Service (QoS) as perceived by the network users it is necessary to:

• detect failures in the network as soon as they occur and alert the operating personnel as fast as possible;
  isolate the failures (autonomously or through operator intervention), i.e. switch off faulty units and, if applicable, limit the effect of the failure as much as possible by reconfiguration of the faulty NE/adjacent NEs;
• if necessary, determine the cause of the failure using diagnosis and test routines; and,
• repair/eliminate failures in due time through the application of maintenance procedures.

This aspect of the management environment is termed "Fault Management" (FM). The purpose of FM is to detect failures as soon as they occur and to limit their effects on the network QoS as far as possible. The latter is achieved by bringing additional/redundant equipment into operation, reconfiguring existing equipment/NEs, or by repairing/eliminating the cause of the failure. Fault Management (FM) encompasses all of the above functionalities except commissioning/decommissioning of NEs and potential operator triggered reconfiguration (these are a matter of Configuration Management). FM also includes associated features in the Operations System (OS), such as the administration of alarm list, the presentation of operational state information of physical and logical devices/resources/functions, and the provision and analysis of the alarm and state history of the network.

The present document defines the Alarm Integration Reference Point (IRP) Information Service (IS), which addresses the alarm surveillance aspects of Fault Management (FM), applied to the Itf-N. The purpose of the AlarmIRP is to define an interface through which a "system" (typically a Network Element Manager or a Network Element) can communicate alarm information for its managed objects to one or several Manager Systems (typically Network Management Systems). The Alarm IRP IS defines the semantics of alarms and the interactions visible across the reference point in a protocol neutral way. It defines the semantics of the operations and notifications visible in the IRP. It does not define the syntax or encoding of the operations, notifications and their parameters.

The following documents contain provisions which, through reference in this text, constitute provisions of the present document.

• References are either specific (identified by date of publication, edition number, version number, etc.) or non-specific.
• For a specific reference, subsequent revisions do not apply.
• For a non-specific reference, the latest version applies. In the case of a reference to a 3GPP document (including a GSM document), a non-specific reference implicitly refers to the latest version of that document in the same Release as the present document.