Monitoring and Analysis of Network Devices’ Configurations Based on the NETCONF Protocol

Network monitoring is crucial for minimizing errors and ensuring the efficient operation of network devices and infrastructure itself. Through network monitoring, one can provide users with the historical status of devices, allowing one to detect certain configuration changes and identify why they occur. With the increasing number of network devices in use today, it is challenging to ensure that active configurations are equal to their desired state. Although the Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) is considerably more secure than the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) due to its use of TCP and encryption for communication, this does not prevent developers from making configuration errors, such as incorrect port numbers, total number of ports, wrong IP addresses, and similar issues. This paper presents an enhanced solution for controlling devices that use the NETCONF protocol for configuration management. By employing specific techniques to compare configurations in XML format and continuously monitoring devices on the network, the system can identify configuration errors and differences in comparison to the expected configuration. Additionally, by displaying historical results for a given device or statistical data of all devices over time, one can more easily identify the root cause of an error and thereby find its solution.