This value, carried in an SGM (Stream Guardian Module) trap, reports the operational status of the module: boot, bypass, monitoring, optimisation, or tap mode. An admin monitors this trap to know which functional mode the WAN optimization/monitoring appliance is currently operating in, since a mode change, such as dropping into bypass, means active optimization is no longer happening. For example, receiving a trap with this object set to ope-bypass(2) would alert the admin that the appliance has fallen back to simply passing traffic through without optimizing it.