Distributed network management (NM) architectures exploiting the advantages of mobile agents (MA) promise to relieve some of the limitations intrinsic to client-server based centralised NM, such as lack of scalability, interoperability and flexibility. However, the use of MAs alone could impose an unnecessary transmission overhead if mobile code were to be used for trivial tasks. Hence, an infrastructure based on a hybridisation of centralised and distributed approaches is proposed, which maintains the lightweight nature of centralised NM for trivial management tasks, whilst adopting a distributed MA-based scheme as task complexity and suitability changes. Remote processing and compression of NM data issues are investigated in order to reduce the bandwidth usage. Security enhancements are also considered.