ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS IN A COMMUNICATION NETWORK

Root cause analysis in a communication network may be provided in a network management system in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention. The system receives a set of events the network. One such received event may indicate a network problem. The system, through time windowing and/or filtering, identifies a sub-set of events, in the first set, as candidate events for a root cause of the problem. The system generates a score value for each candidate event in the sub-set, indicating how likely each such candidate event is the root cause of the problem. The score value is based in part on a hop distance between an entity that generated the event indicating the problem and another entity that generated the candidate event. The system then selects one of the candidate events, which has a minimum score value, as the root cause event for the problem reported.