OAM (Operations, Administration and Management) processes for data networks are often subject to the problem of circular dependencies when relying on network connectivity of the network to be managed for the OAM operations itself. Provisioning during device/network bring up tends to be far less easy to automate than service provisioning later on, changes in core network functions impacting reachability can not be automated either because of ongoing connectivity requirements for the OAM equipment itself, and widely used OAM protocols are not secure enough to be carried across the network without security concerns. This document describes how to integrate OAM processes with the autonomic control plane (ACP) in Autonomic Networks (AN). to provide stable and secure connectivity for those OAM processes.