NETCONF Tutorial

NETCONF is a network device management protocol designed for configuring devices and querying both their configuration and their operational status. It’s built with automation and cloud-scale networks in mind, unlike the traditional CLI, which was designed for a human typing commands and whose exact syntax varies from one vendor to the next.

Standardization: NETCONF and YANG

NETCONF was created by the IETF, together with a companion data modeling language called YANG, specifically to bring structure and vendor interoperability to device configuration. A YANG data model defines exactly what parameters are valid for a given piece of configuration — for example, what’s allowed for a VLAN’s ID, its name, and its state.

NETCONF vs. SNMP

SNMP is mainly used for collecting statistics from devices, not for actually configuring them. NETCONF, by contrast, supports transactional configuration changes — a device’s configuration can be validated, committed, or rolled back to a known-good state, and this transactional behavior can even be coordinated across multiple devices in a network at once.