NETCONF provides mechanisms to install, manipulate, and delete the configuration of network devices.
Its operations are realized on top of a simple Remote Procedure Call (RPC) layer.
One particular strength of NETCONF is its support for robust configuration change using transactions involving a number of devices.
It turned out that each network operator was primarily using a different proprietary command-line interface (CLI) to configure their devices.
This had a number of features that the operators liked, including the fact that it was text-based, as opposed to the BER-encoded SNMP.
In addition, many equipment vendors did not provide the option to completely configure their devices via SNMP.
As operators generally liked to write scripts to help manage their boxes, they found the SNMP CLI lacking in a number of ways.
The set of additional protocol features that an implementation supports is communicated between the server and the client during the capability exchange portion of session setup.
A capability to support subscribing and receiving asynchronous event notifications is published in RFC 5277.
This document defines the