Network fault discovery
AssigneeBritish Telecommunications public limited company
InventorDalia Abouelmaati
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Network addresses which are frequently accessed by user terminals are monitored by a network access point to which the terminals are connected, and the network access point then makes attempts to access the network addresses from time to time and makes reports to a network management system of any such network addresses that fail to respond. This increases the likelihood of detection and reporting of failures of active addresses before the user has need of them.
Claims15
A method of monitoring a data communications network to identify outages of resources associated with network addresses comprising:
- recording, at each of one or more access points, respective access attempts to network addresses for which successful access attempts made by user terminals through the access point over the data communications network have been recorded in a predetermined period;
- transmitting test attempt requests generated by each of the one or more access points to a plurality of target network addresses, the plurality of target network addresses being addresses for which successful access attempts made by user terminals were recorded;
- and
- reporting any such network addresses that fail to respond to a network management system.
An access point for connecting one or more user terminals to a data communications network, comprising:
- a test generation processor for generating test access requests for transmission over the data communications network to target network addresses;
- a response monitor for detecting responses to the test messages received from the target network addresses through the data communications network;
- an alerting processor for generating reports of failed responses, for transmission to a remote management system;
- and
- an access request monitor for detecting and recording access requests made by user terminals connected to the access point to target network addresses, being addresses for which successful access attempts have been recorded in a predetermined period,
- wherein the test generation processor is arranged to generate test messages for transmission to the target addresses.
A computer system associated with a communications access point and comprising:
- a processor and memory storing computer program code for, when the computer program code is executed by the processor, monitoring a data communications network to identify outages of resources associated with network addresses by:
- recording access attempts to network addresses for which successful access attempts made by user terminals through the access point over the data communications network have been recorded in a predetermined period;
- generating test attempt requests;
- transmitting the test attempt requests from the access point to a plurality of target network addresses, the target network addresses being addresses for which successful access attempts made by user terminals were recorded;
- and
- reporting any such network addresses that fail to respond to a network management system.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.