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Operations, administration, and management or operations, administration, and maintenance (OA&M or OAM) are the processes, activities, tools, and standards involved with operating, administering, managing and maintaining any system. This commonly applies to telecommunication, computer networks, and computer hardware.
In particular, Ethernet operations, administration and maintenance (EOAM) is the protocol for installing, monitoring and troubleshooting Ethernet metropolitan area network (MANs) and Ethernet WANs. The OAM features covered by this protocol are discovery, link monitoring, remote fault detection and remote loopback.