e Event Handler Service is responsible for receiving, handling (filtering and correlating), and forwarding asynchronous events to the client application, which is the web browser. The reception of events and alarms is fundamental for a network management application which includes fault management. Event processing is thus a central part of WebComm: the architecture of the Event Handler Service, described below, allows the event processing load to be distributed over several machines. The Monitoring Service is responsible for monitoring network elements. This service can poll managed elements for state information in order to generate statis- tical graphs or to identify fault conditions. When an abnormal condition is identi- fied, the Monitoring Service can send an event to the Event Handler Service. The information it produces can also be retrieved synchronously by the CGI application. Both the Event Handler Service and Monitoring Service have CORBA interfaces. These CORBA interfaces may be used to reconfigure these services. By using CORBA interfaces, the user interface application becomes a module that is independent of the management application and may be built in any programming language and platform that has an Object Request Broker (ORB) implemented. An alternative user interface application may be built, for instance, with the HP OpenView plat- form. WebComm uses SNMP as the management protocol for communication with network devices. 14.3.2 Event Handler Service Events that are handled by the Event Handler Service are asynchronous notifica- tions, such as SNMP traps or higher level messages, having as their main purpose reporting faults to the administrator or management application itself, thus allow- ing a manual or automatic corrective action to be carried out immediately. However, the direct reception of events is not advisable. In large networks, the number of events received can be so high as to make it difficult for the operator to identify the real cause of the problem because the user interface 