computer networking A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

, the management plane of a networking device is the element of a system that configures, monitors, and provides management, monitoring and configuration services to, all layers of the

network stack The protocol stack or network stack is an implementation of a computer networking protocol suite or protocol family. Some of these terms are used interchangeably but strictly speaking, the ''suite'' is the definition of the communication protoco ...

and other parts of the system. It should be distinguished from the

control plane In network routing, the control plane is the part of the router architecture that is concerned with drawing the network topology, or the information in a routing table that defines what to do with incoming packets. Control plane functions, such as ...

, which is primarily concerned with

routing table In computer networking, a routing table, or routing information base (RIB), is a data table stored in a router or a network host that lists the routes to particular network destinations, and in some cases, metrics (distances) associated with th ...

and

forwarding information base A forwarding information base (FIB), also known as a forwarding table or MAC table, is most commonly used in network bridging, routing, and similar functions to find the proper output network interface controller to which the input interface shou ...

computation. In system diagrams, the management plane is typically shown in three dimensions as overlapping the network stack, separated by a dimension that delineates the power plane, control plane,

data plane In routing, the forwarding plane, sometimes called the data plane or user plane, defines the part of the router architecture that decides what to do with packets arriving on an inbound interface. Most commonly, it refers to a table in which the ...

, and management plane.

See also