Network operations
In the preceding sections, we explored how the OpenConfig management interface approaches two common network automation use cases: configuration management and operational state collection. These two tasks alone can get you a long way in your network automation journey, but there is a set of common operational tasks that don’t fall into either of these categories.
To automate all aspects of network operations, we need to perform tasks such as network device reloads, software life cycle management, and counter and adjacency resets. You normally execute these activities as part of interactive CLI workflows, with prompts and warnings that assume a human operator is involved in the process. This makes the automation of these tasks a major undertaking, as we have to resort to screen-scraping, which increases the already high risk of these tasks.
To address these challenges, OpenConfig proposed a new gRPC API, designed to abstract away the interactive commands...