ic customer and discounting is applied in the bill wherever SLAs (service level agreements) are not meet or as per the subscription policy of the customer. Network planning and development: Collection of management data is required for network planning and development. For example, consider NMS Functions capacity planning of a resource in the network. Though the actual specifi- cations for the resource might specify a capacity value, this would mostly be a response obtained in ideal conditions and not suitable while configur- ing the resource for a specific service. The throughput of the resource and generated performance records and events will provide information on the actual capacity of the resource for a specific service. While throughput is the actual output in a specific period of time, capacity is the maximum output possible. Network provisioning and inventory: The inventory module and provision- ing module monitors the collected management data for changes in con- figuration. When a change in configuration is identified as part of an audit operation or during discovery, actions are performed to update the inventory and perform provisioning. Discrepancies in data between the inventory pro- visioning module and the actual value in the network can be fixed using one of the three methods: - Reconciliation: In this method the data in the network is always con- sidered to be correct, SO the other modules in the NMS are updated to reflect the values in the network. That is, configuration specified in the provisioning module and resource allocation in the inventory module is updated with the values identified from the network. This is the method usually used for synchronization. - Reprovisioning: In this method any discrepancy indicates that the net- work is not working as expected and needs to be reconfigured for opti- mal utilization. The underlying resources are reprovisioned to have the network values mirror the predefined values identified by the NMS. That is, the inventory module will reallocate the resour