Avaya Media Processing Server 1000 Hardware Installation And Maintenance page 173

NIC and TMS System Alarm Monitoring
System alarms supplement the alarms logged by the TMS and NIC. The information contained in
the TMS and NIC alarms are accessible for engineering diagnostics through event tracing.
Depending on the alarm condition, a fault system alarm can be self clearing. Alarm conditions that
include span alarms and clock loss are self-clearing. Example of alarms that are not self-clearing
are hardware and system boot failures. These require you or a field engineer to take corrective
action.
Fault conditions that affect every TMS and NIC in a chassis are declared as chassis-wide alarms.
ATM link integrity failure and system clock failures are two alarms that fit into this category.
Using MPS Manager, alarm conditions can be cleared and masked by a field engineer. Masked
alarms do not generate an alarm or enable an LED on the VRC front panel. Clearing an alarm also
turns off the appropriate LED.
Alarm Retrieval
As alarm conditions change, the system automatically sends an alarm to the alarm viewer in MPS
Manager. The hardware also stores the states of the alarms and this information can be retrieved
through the common component in a vshell window. Two commands are provided, the first retrieves
only active alarms on the system and the second retrieves all active and inactive alarms. This full
report maintains a history of how many times an alarm condition has occurred even if it is not
currently active. Therefore, if your system experiences problems with clocking or spans you can
view the full report to see how often the error has occurred.
Architecture
In an MPS 1000 environment, each NIC and TMS maintains the status of any internal system alarm
conditions. Status information can be retrieved at any time from MPS Manager. Additionally, NICs
query all TMS, after power up, to enable the appropriate LEDs on the VRC front panel. Alarms
generated by a TMS are forwarded to the NIC to enable the appropriate LED. The NIC then
forwards the alarm to the alarm viewer in MPS Manager.
The NIC is a backup for TMS alarms. If a TMS crashes, the NIC maintains the last state of a TMS.
State information is cleared when a TMS reboots.
Redundancy
Because each NIC and TMS maintains alarm status after a failover a new controller y retrieves the
alarm states from the TMS and NIC cards.
Alarm Categories
System failure can be categorized as either a runtime failure or a system startup failure. Startup and
initialization errors indicate that either a hardware or configuration problem exists on a platform.
Runtime errors are faults detected after the TMS and NICs load their images.
System start-up problems can be attributed to several components or subcomponents of a platform.
Errors during system start-up are typically due to either hardware failure or system configuration
errors. Any alarm generated on start-up clearly identifies (when possible) whether the problem is
system configuration or hardware related. It is difficult to isolate a boot failure.
Runtime errors and faults indicate a problem at an interface. The interface can be any hardware
component or subcomponent within the TMS including all external interfaces to the TMS. Internal
interfaces include memory, DSPs, Time Space Switch (TSS), driver errors, and so on. External
interfaces include Ethernet, spans, clocking power supplies, and so on.
October 2014 Avaya Media Processing Server 1000 Hardware Installation and Maintenance
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