What You Declared ≠ What You Run

The Network Doesn’t Care What You Intended

Let’s get something straight:

Your network doesn’t care what you meant to do.
It runs what it sees.

You might have a beautifully defined desired state, stored in Git, structured in YAML, and validated by schema. But that’s not what users experience. Users experience reality: the actual, active network state across routers, links, protocols, and policies.

And when that reality no longer matches your intent?
You’re not just out of sync. You’re flying blind.

This is called intent drift, and it’s one of the most dangerous and under-discussed operational failures in large-scale network environments.

At a small scale, intent drift might be obvious. Maybe a diff script catches it. Maybe someone logs into a box and spots a rogue config line. But at hyperscale?

• Hundreds of thousands of routers.

• Millions of config lines.

• Dozens of automation systems.

• Thousands of manual and automated changes per week.

You will not catch what you don’t monitor.
And what you don’t monitor will eventually break something critical.

This article is about how to fix that. We'll dive into:

• What causes intent drift (yes, even in fully automated networks)

• Why traditional methods of detection and remediation break down at scale

• How to build continuous validation pipelines that detect, visualize, and remediate drift in real time

• What we’ve seen work in the wild, backed by results

Let’s begin with the failure itself: What is intent drift, and where does it hide?

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