processing consists of collection, processing, and dis- tribution of management information and data records. The collection and distri- bution of data can be associated with resource, service instance, or an enterprise process. The data collection also includes auditing operations to synchronize static data and collect dynamic management data like the state of the network elements. The NMS functions that are part of resource data collection and processing are: Collection of management information: This involves collection of manage- ment information from network elements, EMS solutions, and other service interfaces for processing and distribution to other modules. The collected data can be events, performance records, call records for accounting, configu- ration records for planning, and SO on. Collection of management informa- tion can be from distributed systems or from processes in the same system. Different interface standards have been defined for data collection to and from the network management system. Processing of management information: The management information needs to be processed before distribution to other modules in the NMS or external applications. An example where formatting would be required after data col- lection before distributing it to another NMS module would be filtering of event logs based on the user role and aggregation of event logs from different Fundamentals of EMS, NMS and OSS/BSS network elements to generate service level logs. Processing it in terms of for- matting the management data would be required before distributing the data to another OSS or EMS application. Distribute management information: Distribution is concerned with func- tions that ensure that management data after processing is delivered to the intended recipient. This would involve sending the data to the concerned module, informing the sending module on the status of the delivery and free- ing temporary storage in the sender once the delivery is complete. Audit Data: Auditing is the process of querying the 