The last few years have been marked by a significant and worldwide growth in the demand for telecommunications services. Such scenery of network expansion and the need for coexistence and interoperability of different technologies in an economically viable way provides great challenges for the management, operation and maintenance of telecommunications networks. This work presents some of the main network management models and paradigms traditionally employed in telecommunications networks and that still count with wide adoption in the industry as of this day. Many of the presented models have been significantly influenced by concepts and techniques originated in the software engineering field. A great emphasis is particularly given to the use of network management techniques based on software agents. To this end, important concepts of software agents are presented, as well as examples of works where software agents are used in the network management domain. Finally, an architecture based on software agents used for fault management in legacy telecommunications networks, which are usually managed by centralized systems, is proposed. The main objective of this architecture is to allow the diagnosis and the correction of network faults in a way not to overload the centralized management system. To this end, the architecture uses software agents that distribute information maintained in the centralized management system to other agents of the system. In such way, it is possible for the agents responsible for executing the fault diagnosis and correction procedures to perform their activities without the necessity for direct communication with the centralized system.