nicians to manage the network. The telecom network is evolving rapidly with new standards and enhanced hardware and software capabilities. The technicians need to keep pace with this change for managing the network effectively. Minimum manual intervention is a requirement set out by standardizing bodies to be part of next generation network management. By making intelligent network and service management solutions, the manual intervention involved would be reduced, cutting down the cost of operations support. Some of the operations involved in network operations support need function- alities in the element management system. Let us consider the EMS functionalities involved in operations support: Network management and monitoring would involve management and mon- itoring of the elements in the network. EMS is the key to manage and moni- tor elements in the network. Software maintenance on a network element would involve installing bug fixes, enhancement features, and SO on. EMS provides functionality to remotely do software maintenance from the machine running the EMS at a NOC. Information security handled at NOC uses security logs captured by the EMS from the network element. These logs provide information on security at the element level, which can be critical when the element being managed is a security gateway. EMS Functions Troubleshooting of issues at element level is performed using an EMS. There would usually be a single NMS application that shows consolidated infor- mation of the network and from which element management system for a specific element can be launched. Most EMS application has the functionality that allows the user to log into the network element. This functionality can be used for performing opera- tions like upgrade and migration of data from the network element remotely from some other machine and not physically going to the element location and logging into the NE. 4.8 Network/Service Monitoring and Control Service monitoring and control is performed by an operation support system and 