The alarm masking mechanism is a feature of the 1830 PSS that prevents unnecessary alarms from being displayed on the GUI or forwarded to an external NMS when they are caused by a known fault or maintenance activity. For example, if an optical link is down due to a fiber cut, there is no need to show alarms for all the downstream interfaces that are affected by the link failure. The alarm masking mechanism hides these alarms until the root cause is resolved, and then shows them again if they persist. The alarm masking mechanism preserves the events’ original time stamps when it masks/shows alarms, so that when an alarm is not masked anymore, the user can see the original date and time associated with the issue. This helps to identify and troubleshoot problems more accurately and efficiently. References : Optical User Guide - Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent 1830 PSS-8 and PSS-16 Photonic Service Switch