Table tnTrapBufferTable serves as a circular trap buffer for all trap notifications destined for a Network Management Station (NMS). When such a trap event occurs, it is copied into tnTrapBufferTable. Subsequently, a trap notification is sent to the NMS. If the NMS temporarily loses its connection with the node agent, any trap notifications missed during the outage may be recovered from this table. The NMS can do this by referring to the serial number associated with the last received trap before the outage and the serial number associated with the last missed trap sent by the node agent during the outage. The serial number of the last missed trap can be determined by getting the value of variable tnLastMissedTrap from the node agent.