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Relation with other management approaches

Although TMN recommendation M.3010 does not make any reference to the Internet nor to its management protocol SNMP, it is still possible to explain the relationship between TMN and SNMP. TMN also includes a number of concepts that may be relevant to the Internet management community.

There is a strong relationship between TMN and OSI management. TMN's functional architecture, which is defined in terms of function blocks and reference points, can for example be explained in terms of OSI concepts. Function blocks contain functional components (such as `Presentation Functions' or MIBs) and are comparable to OSI protocol entities. Reference points are used to interconnect function blocks and are in OSI terminology comparable to underlying (management information) service providers (Figure 23).