Traditional Legacy Network Management

Traditional networking

For better and for worse, not a lot has changed about networks over the past 30 years. Since the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model was published in 1984, there has been a rise in function virtualization, a move towards bigger and faster boxes, and improvements in bandwidth. However, the configuration and operation of networks has become a predictable and tedious task. Once administrators have learned to operate a device, along with the fundamentals of networking and the OSI model, there is little further progress. While the size and scale of modern networks have exploded, few tools have emerged to operate and configure network devices at scale. Connecting to the Command Line Interface (CLI) and applying configurations manually- device-by-device, line-by-line- regardless of scale has long been the only methodology available to network administrators.

Modern network management systems do exist as appliances or specialized software. However, many do not offer much beyond a graphical user interface (GUI) representing the ...