mance, concurrence and atomicity of all the operations. 48 The persistent information is used to generate reports and for auditing. An internal caching mechanism helps to speed up transactions. 47 "Out-of-the-box" is a software industry term meaning "without need for extension or expert configuration". 48 Persistence refers to data that is stored - i.e. data that "persists". 12 Fault Management The services offered by FMS are exposed through APIs. AdventNet intends that these be used to develop scalable and secure applications on top of the core func- tionality of FMS. Some consider fault management to be the most vital part of any management system OSS from a network administrator's point of view. Once a service has been designed, provisioned and activated, then ensuring continuing availability of that service to customers is largely a matter of managing faults. Effective fault manage- ment should enable the administrator to identify failure in the networked environ- ment with minimal effort. 12.3 Traps in SNMP Devices Notifications, also known as event reports, are examples of events in a managed system. Notifications are sent to a list of managers configured to receive events for that managed system. In the case of SNMP, traps provide the value of one or more instances of managed object information. Any SNMP-enabled device generates traps that are defined in the MIB which is implemented by the SNMP agent. The MIB contains trap details such as the name and a short description of the trap and device-related information. The trap definition varies with the SNMP version. The major difference between the message formats is in identifying the events. For SNMPvl traps: The trap is represented as trap-type in the MIB. Generic type, specific type and the enterprise object ID together uniquely iden- tify a fault and these are available as separate fields. Information is carried as values that are assigned to variables. For SNMPv2 traps: The trap is represented as notification type in the MIB. Trap object ID identifies t