Autonomous Message Structure

Autonomous Message

An Autonomous message is a message that is sent from the NE to the appropriate OS without having an explicit input message associated with it.

Typical scenarios where autonomous messages are used include:

Reporting of alarmed or non-alarmed trouble events.
Reporting of scheduled diagnostic tests in the NE.
Reporting of Performance Monitoring data.
Reporting of a change in the NE's database.
Periodic reporting of selected NE conditions.

General Format: The general structure of a TL1 Autonomous message is,

<header> <auto id> [ <text block> ] <terminator>

Here, the text block is the optional field and all other fields are essential.

Header

The Header represents information common to all output responses and autonomous messages. It contains system identifier <sid>, date, and time stamps.

<cr><lf><lf>^^^<sid>^<year>-<month>-<day>^<hour>:<minute>:<second>

Here, <sid> is restricted to 20 characters maximum and identifies the NE that generated the message. The syntax of <sid> is any TL1 identifier or text string. The <year><month><day> construct represents the day in which the output response is generated. The <hour><minute> <second> construct represents the time at which the output response is generated.

AutoID

It indicates the severity and the nature of the autonomous message. The <Auto id> entry for an autonomous message is of the form:

<cr><lf> <almcde>^<atag>^<verb>[^<modifier>[^<modifier>]]

Here, <almcde> is the alarm code. It can be any of the following based on the severity of the autonomous message.

Alarm code	Description
*C	Critical Alarm
**	Major Alarm
*^	Minor Alarm
A^	Non-Alarm

If Multiple Alarms are reported in the same message, the alarm code is the highest severity of those being reported.

<atag> is the Autonomously Generated Correlation Tag. It is assigned by the NE and must be sequential. It must be included in all autonomously generated messages. It allows an OS to correlate spontaneous outputs triggered by a common problem and also to identify whether the OS has failed to receive any output.

<verb>[^<modifier>[^<modifier>]] entry identifies the nature of the spontaneous output. The first identifier is a required entry and indicates the message verb. The autonomous message can have two optional modifiers separated by space character.

Text Block

The optional [<text block>] is used to represent information specific to the particular autonomous message. The format of the text block is as follows:

((<cr><lf>^^^<unquoted line>)|(<cr><lf>^^^<quoted line>)|(<cr><lf>^^^<comment>))+

It consists of three components, namely unquoted line, quoted line, and comment. Both quoted and unquoted lines consist of text that is parsable, while comment is not.

Terminator

The terminator block has the form,

<cr><lf> ( ; | >)

This is required for all TL1 message types.

Example

<cr><lf><lf>
^^^Source 99-01-01 06:06:06 <CR><lf>
A^^123^REPT^ALM^COM <cr><lf>
^^^"SP:MJ,INT,NSA,01-01,06-06-06,NEND,NA:\"Disk Full\"" <cr><lf>
;

Here, '^' symbol indicates Space.