Category:  Network Management

If you’ve ever had to manage and configure more than a few routers in a production environment, there probably was a moment when you had to figure out what changes were made to a device configuration.

Answering that question seems to be an easy task; after all, device configurations are just text files:

• Periodically collect device configurations and store them somewhere (shared disk, database, or source code repository like Git)
• Whenever you have to figure out what changed, run a utility like diff to identify changes in text files.

Whenever you’re faced with an “unexpected” network outage that doesn’t seem to be caused by a hardware failure, the root cause often tends to be a change in a device configuration, raising these questions:

• What changes were made to the device configuration?
• When were the changes made?
• Who made them?