Alarms are emitted by whichever element notices a problem first, which is frequently a victim rather than the culprit. A transport link degrading will make dozens of cells scream about backhaul before the link's own alarm clears its debounce timer. Ordering alarms by arrival time and acting on the top one is the classic trap that sends responders to the wrong site.
An agent should group alarms by topology (shared transport, shared baseband, shared power), then look for the element whose failure would explain the largest fan-out of symptoms — often a single node low in the dependency tree. Correlate against change events too: a fault that begins minutes after a config push points at the change, not the elements complaining.
Caveat: correlation by topology requires an accurate inventory/dependency map; when the topology data is stale, alarm-timestamp ordering is a weak but legitimate fallback — just flag the lower confidence in the incident record.