What is NETCONF?

NETCONF is an IETF standard for configuration management. The NETCONF configuration protocol provides automated mechanisms to install, manipulate, and delete the configuration of network devices. In contrast, CLI and Web interfaces are used for configuration tasks by human operators.

Under NETCONF, client and server devices communicate using XML data via a secure, connection-oriented sessions. NETCONF includes some core operations and a number of optional capabilities that are designed to ensure new configurations can be consistently rolled-out to multiple devices. For example, if an upgrade were to fail on the twentieth device being upgraded, the NETCONF protocol will control rolling back to the prior version.

NETCONF was officially published as a RFC number on December 13, 2006. For detailed information on the standard, see RFC 4741 and RFC 4742.

Event Notification and Partial Locking are two extensions to NETCONF currently in draft form. Event Notification provides an optional capability for a NETCONF client to subscribe to a server to receive event information. An event is something that happens which may be of interest - a configuration change, a fault, or an external input to the system, for example. Partial Locking can lock portions of a configuration data store. Partial locking provides the ability to allow multiple management sessions to modify the configuration of a managed device in parallel.

In addition to providing native support for NETCONF, Tail-f’s software also allows command line and Web interfaces to use transactions on startup, running, and candidate configurations, in the same way as is used by NETCONF.