NETCONF is a protocol designed by the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) as the standard protocol to install, manipulate, and delete the configuration of network devices. NETCONF is protocol operations are realized on top of a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) layer.

NETCONF clients and servers communicate using secure, connection-oriented sessions. NETCONF includes a set of core operations and a number of optional capabilities that are designed to ensure new configurations can be consistently rolled-out to multiple devices. This includes transaction safe changes where, if a configuration change fail on any of the participating devices being upgraded, the NETCONF protocol will control rolling back to the prior version.

The NETCONF base protocol and a small set of transport mappings was officially published as a RFC number on December 13, 2006. For detailed information on the standard, see RFC 4741 (base protocol), RFC 4742 (SSH transport mapping), RFC 4743 (SOAP transport mapping), and RFC 4744 (BEEP transport mapping).

RFC 5277 describes the standard for NETCONF Event Notifications and was released in July 2008. Event Notifications provide an optional capability for a NETCONF client to subscribe to a NETCONF server to receive event information. An event is something that happens which may be of interest – for example configuration changes, faults, or external input to the system.