If you look at the marketing material, there seems to be a lot of configuration management tools on the market. However, when you dig into the actual functionality available for writing configurations to the devices, it is disappointing. The practice for these kinds of tools is to push and pull configuration files, store them, diff them and restore them. This works fine for static environments. The above tools do not actually understand the configurations, they treat them as opaque text files.
NSO on the other hand understands the configurations and represent them as fine-grained data structures in the embedded configuration database. Thereby NSO can provide configuration-aware tools like the CLI, configuration validation, an auto-rendered web interface, etc. And most importantly NSO can do real-time fine-grained changes r ather than diffing and pulling configuration files.
NSO can also do service provisioning.
Some vendors have fantastic tools for managing their specific devices. This works great if you have a single-vendor network. However, single-vendor networks are rare.
