The massive number and variety of network elements in a mobile system creates a huge amount of alarms, saturating the alarm management systems. In parallel the numbers of different types of alarms have increased to overwhelming proportions. The network administrators are flooded with alarms and alarms often of poor quality. The consequences of bad quality alarms are severe, affecting many areas. Determining the service impacts of faults in the networks is an increasingly complex challenge for operators and requires good quality alarms. The fault management area is well established in the telecommunications business; this technical report will explore the alarm information itself, target users, usage of information, mechanisms and processes to enhance usability of the alarm information. The telecommunications alarm management experience described is shared in basically all areas of alarm management. Standardization bodies in the production and engineering fields (e.g. EEMUA [7], ANSI [6]) have addressed the problem and undertaken substantial work under last decade to come up with solutions. The objective of this study is to analyse and secure applicability and impacts of the concept of alarm management in Telecom management. It is proposed to benefit from work in the production and engineering field, since the task of alarm management to a very high degree is independent of different businesses. It is a human-machine interaction. This study also makes a shift in direction for telecommunications fault management standards, which historically have been focused on protocols and syntax for alarm parameters. In order to address the real problems, standards also need to focus on alarm quality and alarm semantics. The present document is the result of the 3GPP WG SA5 study conducted under SP-120774 [12] "New WID Study on Alarm Management", SA #58, Barcelona, December 2012.

The scope of the present document is to study how to improve the quality of alarms and enhance usability of alarm systems.