New technologies, systems, and services in telecommunication have increased the need for an efficient and robust control mechanism to protect switching systems from overload. To achieve proper control, it is necessary to find a set of parameters that can describe the system. However, it is difficult to find types of data that can form a suitable basis for control. In this paper, we categorize the load status of a switching system into three classes (i.e., normal state, pre-overload state, and overload state) and formulate the overload detection as a classification problem. We find the relationships between the load classes and a set of monitored switching system parameters by applying a fuzzy rule-generation method. The rules are automatically generated from training data. Simulation results involving a switching system is given.