Configuration Management

Every installation of Iotellect Network Manager in a large network has a huge database of connected devices, including routers, switches, wireless access points, firewalls, and more. This database is in most cases built using network discovery.

Configuration of all these devices can be periodically retrieved by the central server and backed up to the server database. In most cases, this requires no additional configuration, except for specifying devices' auth credentials.

System operators are immediately warned if a configuration change is detected by periodic configuration polling or a change event is received from a device (e.g. in a form of a Syslog message or an SNMP trap). This enables real-time network-wide monitoring of reconfiguration activities and quick isolation of incidents related to erroneous configuration.

All historical configurations are stored in the central database until pre-configured expiration conditions force their deprecation. Those conditions, as well as backup schedules and network segments included into the backup process, can be customized by system administrators.

Administrators can browse historical configuration database at any time and easily compare several configurations in a visual difference viewer. Several types of comparisons are supported:

  • Comparison between historical versions of one configuration
  • Comparison of different devices' configurations
  • Comparison of several configuration types, e.g. startup to runtime

Any historical configuration can be re-uploaded to a device in a few mouse clicks. The baselining feature allows to mark one, several or all device configurations as "known to work" and quickly revert to them in case of troubles.

Vendor-Agnostic Operations

Device configurations can be retrieved from a wide range of network hardware provided by different manufacturers. Even for a single hardware type, multiple configuration retrieval methods can be supported. For example, a Cisco device can be commanded via SSH, Telnet or SNMP, and the actual configuration read/write can rely on FTP, TFTP or SCP.

However, all configurations are kept in a generic multi-vendor storage allowing unified approach to their comparison and validation.

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