Many network events need to be handled in a timely fashion. However, current practices are not sufficient to support timely handling of network events mainly due to the lack of a real-time network management model and facilities. In this paper, we propose a new network management system, named a real-time distributed network management (RTDNM), in which the Telecommunication Management Network (TMN) model and the Time-triggered Message-triggered Object (TMO) model are incorporated to support network management facilities and timely handling of network events. In order to realize RTDNM, temporal characteristics of managed objects in a network are modeled and CMIS/CMIP, a network management protocol used in TMN, is annotated with real-time constraints so that timely handling of network events can be supported. A message scheduling scheme for network management is proposed to guarantee timeliness for critical network events. Finally, we present the design of our RTDNM and show current results with a prototype implementation. The scheme presented in this paper turned out to be effective for timely handling of network events.