In general, network management system 10 maintains working drafts of candidate configurations to be applied to network devices 14, prior to committing configuration changes to network devices 14, e.g., in a private data store. Network management system devices that support a private data store persist private copies of data in the private data store separately, until the private copy is committed to a database. Data change requests in one draft need to be checked for conflicts with other drafts and persist the changes. This occurs in the business layer and conflicts detection does not occur in real time. Examples of techniques for detection of conflicts across multiple proposed changes to configuration data is discussed in greater detail in Chandrasekhar et al., “PROCESSING MULTIPLE PARALLEL HIGH LEVEL CONFIGURATION CHANGES FOR MANAGED NETWORK DEVICES,” U.S. Pat. No. 10,374,886, issued on Aug. 6, 2019, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference.

In the example of FIG. 1, network devices 14A-14G are behind NAT device 16 with respect to network management system 10. In this example, network management system 10 may also manage other network devices (not shown) that are not behind a NAT device with respect to network management system 10. For example, network management system 10 may manage network devices in network 8. With a configuration like the example of FIG. 1, typically network devices 14A-G would have to be manually added on to network management system 10 as discussed above.