Maintenance entities may be defined between customer or provider flow points for performance management on an Ethernet network. The maintenance entities may be defined for access link, intra-domain, and inter-domain, and may be defined on a link or service basis. The maintenance entities may be used to monitor performance within a network or across networks, and may be used to monitor various performance parameters, such as frame loss, frame delay, frame delay variation, availability, errored frame seconds, service status, frame throughput, the number of frames transmitted, received or dropped, the status of a loopback interface and/or the amount of time a service has been unavailable. Several management mechanisms may be used, and the measurements may be collected using a solicited collection method, in which a responses are required and collected, or an unsolicited collection method in which a response is not required.