Shaping the Future of Network Management: First Draft of NEMOPS Workshop Report Released

In December 2024, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) hosted the NEMOPS workshop, which built on discussions from a similar workshop held in 2002, reflecting on how far we’ve come and where we’re headed.

As mentioned in our earlier blog post announcing the workshop, the goal was to revisit the outcomes of the 2002 workshop, assess any operational challenges that hindered the widespread adoption of those technologies, and collaboratively define new requirements for future network management operations. The workshop brought together industry experts, network operators, and protocol engineers and generated some key takeaways and recommendations.

The NEMOPS Workshop was structured as a three-day event, with each day focusing on a distinct theme: Past (lookback, analysis); Present (identified problems & requirements) and Future (possible solutions, recommendations, and next steps). Each day featured a series of presentations, followed by open discussions that allowed participants to exchange insights, share real-world experiences, and debate key issues. The final day wrapped up with a discussion on key takeaways and the next steps.

Proceedings

Day one began with a retrospective on the evolution of network management since the 2002 IAB workshop, presented by Jürgen Schönwälder, the author of the 2002 workshop report. Other speakers reflected on past successes, ongoing challenges, and lessons learned from widely used tools. Discussions also explored how network management practices have evolved, particularly in constrained environments, and emphasized the need to reassess IETF’s standardization approach in network management.

The second day of the workshop focused on identifying current challenges and defining emerging requirements for future network management. Key themes included validation, observability, automation, and the need for agile, incremental development of network models and management protocols. As part of outreach initiatives, a survey was conducted to get operator feedback. The survey provided insights into respondents’ backgrounds, the most widely used tools and protocols—highlighting Ansible and CLI for configuration, NetConf as the preferred configuration protocol, and Prometheus and SNMP for monitoring—while also capturing feedback on network automation, streaming telemetry, scalability, model mapping, tooling, legacy device management, open-source collaboration, and vendor-specific challenges.

The final day of the workshop focused on future solutions, key takeaways, and next steps, with discussions covering the Knowledge Graph Framework, model-driven network management, and the need for more efficient data integration across different protocols. A significant portion of the discussion centred on improving standardisation processes and exploring experimental approaches to accelerate iteration within the YANG/OPS community. The workshop concluded with a discussion on key takeaways that had broad consensus, which were live-edited during the final session.

We welcome your feedback to help refine and improve the initial draft workshop report.

Outreach

The NEMOP workshop’s Program Committee recognised the importance of engaging with the network operator community at various industry events, including RIPE, NANOG, APRICOT, LACNIC, and AutoConn, to foster discussions and gauge interest. This outreach involves direct engagement with operators at these venues through information and requirement-gathering sessions.

Our engagement with network operators will continue beyond the workshop, ensuring ongoing information sharing and feedback collection to help shape the next steps and outcomes. Upcoming opportunities for discussion are planned at NANOG, APRICOT, and LACNIC meetings.

For further discussion

The workshop recordings are available on YouTube, and the workshop papers and slides can be accessed via the Datatracker. Follow-up discussions on concrete future requirements, as captured in [I-D.boucadair-nmop-rfc3535-20years-later], are best suited for the NMOPS Working Group mailing list. For broader public discussions, the nemops-interest@iab.org mailing list can be used.

IAB workshops are not the final destination; they're the spark for in-depth discussions and engagement that might otherwise be missing. The real work starts now!