Management Of OSS Using DCN Capability

An operational support system (OSS) (96) for a telecommunications network, is coupled by a data communications network (DCN) (410, 510) with network elements (110) managed by the OSS. The OSS is managed by monitoring (200) an actual capability of the data communications network, and performance of an OSS operation is predicted (220) based on reference performance information and on the actual capability of the DCN. An alarm is raised based on a comparison (230) between the predicted performance and a defined threshold associated with the operation of the operational support system. Compared to known OSS monitoring to detect when an OSS operation has failed to complete, this raising of the alarm can enable pre-emptive management action. By making the prediction based on actual DCN capability, the prediction can have reduced errors from variability or unpredictability in DCN capability.