NSO installs in seconds. There are no third party requirements. ... View more

Limited training is required to get started. NSO is designed to be user friendly to network engineers by providing common tools that they are already familiar using, such as a CLI and a Web interface. ... View more

Before a transaction is committed a user can inspect the actual effect to the network in two ways: “Compare running brief” – this will show the difference between the desired configuration and the current configuration “Dry-run” – this will also involve any service provisioning logic and show the resulting device configurations ... View more

NSO supports different interfaces for different users with different needs and skills: CLI for power-users Web interface for ad-hoc users Programmable interfaces: REST, scripting, Java, JavaScript ... View more

Most network engineers are hard-core CLI users. NSO is the only product on the market that is designed with the network engineer in mind. NSO provides a network-wide CLI to a multi-vendor network. As a real-time abstraction of the network, it doesn’t matter which access methods are used, the network is always in a consistent state . Some of our customers use NSO for network automation by hooking it into their workflow systems, while at the same time having the CLI access for network engineers to quickly review and approve changes to device configurations. ... View more

That is up to the user of NSO – it is configurable. ... View more

NSO performs any configuration change as a diff operation against the current configuration. If a device does not support rollbacks, NSO can use the diff engine to calculate the diff between current state and the previous state before the configuration change is applied. NSO knows the capabilities for different network devices and will issue a config change or just a rollback command depending on the network device capabilities. The data models for the devices specify dependencies explicitly as directed references – this ensures that NSO knows in which order to create and delete items. ... View more

NSO does not just fire-off commands to the network, but rather confirms that all changes in the transaction are deployed correctly at the device level. If at any point of the series a device cannot be changed, the entire transaction is automatically roll-backed. This ensures that there is always a consistent network state. Complex rollback-scenarios like correct ordering of CLI commands is handled. The NSO database, the services and the devices configurations are all part of the same transaction. Users can load network-wide rollback files to undo network changes. ... View more