Administrators 12 use network management system 10 to configure network devices 14 to specify certain operational characteristics that further the objectives of administrators 12. For example, administrators 12 may specify for a device, device 14C for example, a particular operational policy regarding security, device accessibility, traffic engineering, quality of service (QoS), network address translation (NAT), packet filtering, packet forwarding, rate limiting, or other policies. Network management system 10 uses one or more network management protocols designed for management of configuration data within managed network devices 14, such as the SNMP protocol or the Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) protocol or a derivative thereof to perform the configuration. In general, NETCONF provides mechanisms for configuring network devices and uses an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based data encoding for configuration data, which may include policy data. NETCONF is described in Enns, “NETCONF Configuration Protocol,” Network Working Group, RFC 4741, December 2006, available at tools.ietf.org. Network management system 10 may establish NETCONF sessions with one or more of network devices 14.