An enumerated value that describes the severity of the Alert Indication from the notifier's point of view: 1 - Other, by CIM convention, is used to indicate that the Severity's value can be found in the OtherSeverity property. 3 - Degraded/Warning should be used when its appropriate to let the user decide if action is needed. 4 - Minor should be used to indicate action is needed, but the situation is not serious at this time. 5 - Major should be used to indicate action is needed NOW. 6 - Critical should be used to indicate action is needed NOW and the scope is broad (perhaps an imminent outage to a critical resource will result). 7 - Fatal/NonRecoverable should be used to indicate an error occurred, but it's too late to take remedial action. 2 and 0 - Information and Unknown (respectively) follow common usage. Literally, the AlertIndication is purely informational or its severity is simply unknown. This would have values described in SMI-S 1.1 section 8.1.8.25 LibraryAlert Events/Indications for Library Devices, the PerceivedSeverity column. These values are a superset of the Info/Warning/Critical values in the T10 TapeAlert Specification v3 (w/SSC-3 Enhancements) , and an SNMP agent may choose to only specify those if that's all that's available. (This corresponds to the CIM_AlertIndication.PerceivedSeverity property.)