Question

A service provider automation team uses Terraform to manage the configuration of Cisco IOS XR devices via a provider plugin. An engineer manually logs into one router and changes an interface description outside of Terraform. During the next scheduled pipeline run, the team wants Terraform to detect this out-of-band change and report the difference before any apply is executed. Which Terraform behavior enables this and which command surfaces the discrepancy?

Accepted Answer

Terraform compares the real infrastructure against its stored state file; running 'terraform plan' refreshes state and shows the drift as a proposed change to reconcile the manual edit.

Answer

Terraform is fully imperative, so it replays the entire configuration on every run; running 'terraform push' overwrites the router without detecting drift.

Answer

Terraform relies on device-side commit confirmed timers; running 'terraform rollback' reverts the manual change automatically without comparison.

Answer

Terraform stores no state and queries the device live each time; running 'terraform validate' checks syntax and reports the manual configuration change.