Monitoring and administration of data networks and the separate nodes of the data networks are typically performed by a combination of hardware and software components referred to as a network management system (NMS).
Installation and removal of data network nodes (sometimes referred to as “devices”) as well as creation, manipulation or deletion of services in the data network require the NMS to enable reconfiguration of the network nodes.
Monitoring what configuration changes should be made and what configuration changes have been made to the data network nodes of the network is not a trivial task. Nor is it a trivial task to implement the desired configuration of the data network nodes in an efficient manner.
One known way of reconfiguring a network node is to connect and logon to the network node, and to manually enter CLI (command line interface) commands on the integrated command-line interface of the node. However, this process of “locally” reconfiguring network nodes using CLI commands is very time consuming, in particular if the network comprises a large number of network nodes and/or if many configuration parameters are to be changed.
Another and more automated way that allows “remote” reconfiguration of network nodes is to use scripting. However, different nodes speak different languages due to differences in their command-line interfaces. Therefore, the configuration parameters must be embedded in scripts that are individually adapted to the different network nodes in order for the network nodes to understand what configuration changes are to be made. Creating the node-specific scripts, or a script that is interpretable by all nodes of the network, is also a very time consuming process.
There is software for automatic generation of reconfiguration scripts which eliminates the time consuming process of manual scripting. However, such software is developed to support reconfiguration of specific types of network nodes, e.g. a specific router from a specific manufacturer, and cannot be used to generate reconfiguration scripts which are interpretable by all data network nodes normally comprised in larger data networks.
Yet another problem associated with known solutions for reconfiguration of data network nodes is the high amount of data traffic in the network during the reconfiguration process. In some known NMS systems where desired configuration changes of the network nodes are entered into a single database storing the configurations of the network nodes, the configuration changes are implemented by pushing the configuration data in the database to all nodes of the network. In such NMS systems, a network node may be caused to replace its current set of configuration parameters with the set of configuration parameters stored for that node in the database, even if no change has been made to that particular set of configuration parameters since the last time the data of the database was pushed out in the network. The bandwidth requiring data traffic caused by such “redundant reconfiguration” of data network nodes is undesired. Furthermore, it is difficult to keep track of which desired configuration changes have been entered into the database and which are still to be entered before pushing the configuration data out in the network to implement the changes.
Thus, there is a desire to improve both the process of monitoring configuration changes of data network nodes in a data network, and the process of implementing desired configuration changes in the network.