NETWORK MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FOR GENERATING SETUP INFORMATION FOR A PLURALITY OF DEVICES BASED ON COMMON META-LEVEL INFORMATION

A network management system which includes a plurality of network devices operating in a coordinated manner and a management server managing the network devices. The management server includes apparatus for defining policy information and for generating setup information using policy information to generate setup information for each network device. The system generates setup information for each network device, distributes setup information to each network device, installs setup information to each network device, enables settings, collects setup information for each network device, and organizes and checks for consistency in the collected information.