In the past few years the massive deployment of real-time multimedia services has motivated the research community to investigate new quality of service (QoS) mechanisms to overcome the limitations of IP networks. Since assured levels of service must be provided, these mechanisms should interact flexibly with network performance management systems. When such integration is achieved, it is possible to trigger actions effectively to prevent QoS failures and simultaneously to balance network load. Mechanisms for rerouting traffic flows of QoS critical applications may be employed to support performance management systems in satisfying the application requirements. In addition, proactive actions could be taken before applications are affected by QoS failures. To meet these goals, a proactive network management and rerouting framework is introduced. The proposed framework is based on active technology and aims at providing the means needed for establishing new routes with sufficient resources for traffic flows of QoS critical distributed applications. A system prototype using the proposed framework was implemented and test results show that its deployment is feasible considering the hardware processing capability available today.