OA&M

Operations, administration and management or operations, administration and maintenance (OA&M or OAM) are the processes, activities, tools, and standards involved with operating, administering, managing and maintaining any system. This commonly applies to telecommunication, computer networks, and computer hardware.

In particular, Ethernet operations, administration and maintenance (EOAM) is the for installing, monitoring and troubleshooting Ethernet metropolitan area network (MANs) and Ethernet WANs. It relies on a new, optional sublayer in the data link layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. The OAM features covered by this protocol are discovery, link monitoring, remote fault detection, remote loopback.

OAMP, traditionally OAM&P, stands for operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning. The addition of 'T' in recent years stands for troubleshooting, and reflects its use in network operations environments. The term is used to describe the collection of disciplines generally, as well as whatever specific software package(s) or functionality a given company uses to track these things.

Though the term, and the concept, originated in the wired telephony world, the discipline (if not the term) has expanded to other spheres in which the same sorts of work are done, including cable television and many aspects of Internet service and network operation. 'Ethernet OAM' is another recent concept in which the terminology is used.

Operations encompass automatic monitoring of environment, detecting and determining faults and alerting admins. Administration typically involves collecting performance stats, accounting data for the purpose of billing, capacity planning using Usage data and maintaining system reliability. It can also involve maintaining the service databases which are used to determine periodic billing. Maintenance involves upgrades, fixes, new feature enablement, backup and restore and monitoring the media health. The major task is Diagnostics and troubleshooting. Provisioning is the setting up of the user accounts, devices and services.

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