Fault Management (FM) is a very basic functionality of network management. The purpose of FM is to detect failures as soon as they occur and to minimize their impact on the network services. Thus FM functionality consists of functions for detecting, locating, isolating and correcting the failures. These basic functions are same, or at least very similar regardless of the IT environment. FM functionalities had been specified and standardized by several organizations. Even if the functions are same the specifications differ. The differences lead to implementation of several variants of the same functionality. This is an expensive aspect for both vendors and service provides. This study aims to provide background information and recommendations on how to get better alignment of FM specifications between two telecom specification organizations, namely 3GPP and TMF.

The present document collects, compares and analyzes the specifications of Fault Management (FM) as defined by 3GPP and TMF. These two organizations have both a complete set of FM specifications consisting of requirement, technology-independent and solution set specification for

• Fault Management interface - operations and notifications and
• Alarm content

The present documentidentifies similarities and differences of the Fault Management capabilities in 3GPP and TMF and provides recommendations to align these capabilities.