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The following pages will guide you through the various aspects of the Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) use, from basic commands to writing custom drivers. There is a wealth of information in here, which can certainly be daunting for new users. We hope a short overview, along with our suggestions, will help you make the most out of this documentation.

For users just starting with NSO, we highly recommend reading the NSO 5.8 Getting Started Guide first. It provides a brief overview of all the main concepts, such as how to do device management or what services are. It also shows you how to create a simple installation of NSO locally for you to experiment with.

More advanced installation options are covered in NSO Installation Guide, which you should consider if you are setting up a shared instance (accessed by multiple users). For the most part, a simple local installation will suffice. And if not, the documentation will clearly tell you so.

The NSO 5.8 User Guide describes in depth the topics and concepts briefly covered in the Getting Started Guide, covering out-of-the-box network management features. It contains a detailed description of the command-line interface (CLI), connection management, the network simulator, reporting, etc. Most of the other guides expect you to have read this one first.

Complementing the User Guide, the NSO 5.8 Administration Guide focuses on system administration tasks for the NSO server: initial configuration, licensing, backup, high availability, and so on. You should certainly read this if you are deploying a shared or production-grade instance. However, if you are just experimenting with a private, local copy, feel free to consult this guide on an as-needed basis.

The NSO 5.8 Northbound APIs will be of particular interest to system integrators as it details how other systems can interact with NSO, for example to read data or push network configuration. If you're building a custom web frontend on top of NSO, you may find NSO 5.8 Web UI useful as well.

Services play a central role in network configuration with NSO. The NSO 5.8 Development Guide will show you how you can create your own services to do automation. You can use simple XML templates or implement custom logic with the provided API. The latter will require some programming skills but don't let that discourage you. There are simple examples included which you can build on.

While increasingly rare, some use cases may require you to add support for a new device type and the NSO 5.8 NED Development will show you how. Likewise, the NSO Layered Service Architecture will show you how to design very large, scalable services. These are advanced topics, however, and the guides assume you are already fairly familiar with the NSO development. In case you aren't, feel free to skip these until you get some more experience.

NSO 5.1 introduced some major changes to device model handling. The NSO CDM Migration Guide discusses the details, including what to do if you are upgrading from an older release. We recommend new users first read the User Guide for a gentler introduction to these topics.

Additionally, you can browse the online version of the NSO 5.8 Manual Pages or the SDK API Reference. We hope this documentation will serve you well!