Patent ID: 7043660

Claim:
A system comprising: a network element; a gateway managing the network element and receiving fault alarm incidents from the network element; distributed management servers communicatively associated with said gateway, said distributed management servers receiving control from said gateway to process said fault alarm incidents; and policy objects distributed across the distributed management servers so that each policy object resides on and is executable by a respective distributed management server, each policy object defining fault management behavior for managing the network element by the gateway, wherein a respective policy object is executed by the distributed management server on which the policy object resides in response to a respective fault alarm incident received by the gateway and associated with the policy object, to thereby implement the fault management behavior defined by the respective policy object in response to the respective fault alarm incident, wherein said gateway is capable of determining which said policy object corresponds to said fault alarm incident, said gateway capable of selecting a distributed management server from said distributed management servers that is related to said policy object, said gateway capable of routing said fault alarm incident to said selected distributed management server, said gateway capable of transferring control of processing said fault alarm incident according to said policy object to said selected distributed management server.