AUTOMATING NETWORK DEVICE CONFIGURATION TEMPLATE DISCOVERY

Establishing network device golden configuration templates typically relies on largely manual efforts and a dialogue between network consulting engineers and customers. Techniques are presented herein that streamline the process of discovering and baselining network standards by examining underlying themes and relationships between micro-templates in customer environments. Aspects of the presented techniques employ a Masked-Language Model (MLM), in a way that an MLM was not necessarily intended, to detect locally significant attributes in network device configurations for the express purpose of identifying structures that are common across a set of devices. Under further aspects of the presented techniques, the creation of association rules between configuration blocks and the devices on which they are found allows for the identification of underlying themes in configurations that form the basis of network standards and platform-based templates