Presently, the act of troubleshooting a network is a time-consuming task. Several solutions exist that aid network administrators in managing faults in a network by providing various tools for collecting and viewing individual faults (i.e., alarms) and performing a set of operations on them (e.g., acknowledge, clear, escalate, etc.). Typically, these views are variations on tabular displays (i.e., rows of alarms) and two-dimensional (2D) topology displays (i.e., network maps).
These tools are generally adequate for small-to-medium scale network operation centers, such as network operation centers with less than 100 alarms/per shift/per monitoring technician, moderate requirements on the frequency of network upgrades, etc. In environments with a large number of network elements and high alarm rates, however, these tools are often limited with respect to their ability to display relevant, real-time, fault information to monitoring technicians and network operation center's management. These limitations often invalidate the use of available tools in support of large-scale network operations.
Therefore, there exists a need for systems and methods that facilitate the management of a network.