Network administrators of medium- to large-sized networks can spend a lot of time manually configuring devices. For example, a network administrator purchases 10 new Cisco router devices. If the network admin made a backup of the configuration of one router to push to the remaining nine, the configuration file fails on the other routers because of device-specific information included in the first router's network file, such as its device's name and IP address. As such, the network administrator must manually configure each of the new router devices separately, eating into his busy schedule.
Templates were created to allow network admins to automatically push device configurations to devices of the same type by replacing device-specific (IP address, hostname) information with variables, saving them time and reducing the possibility of error from one manual device configuration to another.