An engineer is working with NETCONF and Cisco NX-OS based devices.

A Cisco native YANG model is the right choice when the engineer needs to configure a capability that is specific to Cisco NX-OS. YANG models fall broadly into open standards-based models and vendor-native models. IETF and OpenConfig models are useful for multivendor consistency, but they intentionally model common behavior and may not cover every platform-specific feature. Cisco native models are generated to represent Cisco operating system configuration and operational data more closely, including features that are unique to IOS XE, IOS XR, or NX-OS. Cisco developer guidance commonly positions native models as the model family to use when full platform feature coverage is required. IEEE is not the relevant model family for Cisco NX-OS feature-specific configuration in NETCONF. OpenConfig is useful when the design objective is common cross-vendor abstraction, but that is not the question’s requirement. Therefore, for an NX-OS-only feature that must be configured through NETCONF/YANG, the engineer should choose the Cisco native model for NX-OS.