What is Publish?

Publish is the action in Versa Concerto and Versa Director that commits saved, candidate configuration changes – device templates, service templates, or SASE policy – to the target appliances, SD-WAN devices, or SASE gateways, making the change take effect on the live network rather than sitting as an unapplied draft.

Key takeaways

• Publish pushes saved candidate configuration to live devices and gateways.
• Mass publish applies one template’s config to many devices at once.
• Republish retries only the devices that failed a prior publish attempt.
• Gateway Publish Status tracks history, diffs, and lets you revert.
• Saving a change and publishing it are two distinct, separate steps.

On this page: Why it matters · How it works · Types · Publish & Versa · FAQ

Why is Publish important?

Editing a device template, a service template, or a set of SASE security rules changes only the candidate configuration stored in Concerto or Director – nothing on the network moves until that configuration is published. This split between editing and deploying is what makes large-scale, multi-tenant configuration management safe: an administrator can build out a change, validate it against every device it will touch, and only then commit it, rather than having each keystroke take effect immediately on production traffic.

The split also matters at scale. A single template can be attached to hundreds of devices; publishing is the operation that fans a change out to all of them in one pass, tracks success and failure per device, and gives the administrator a retry path for anything that fails validation or connectivity mid-push. Without a distinct publish step, there would be no safe way to stage a change across a fleet, review what is about to happen, or roll back a bad push after the fact.

What is Publish?

Publish is triggered from a Publish button, which appears wherever candidate configuration can be committed: on device template and service template screens, under the Save dropdown in Director’s Configuration workflows, and on the Configure > SSE lifecycle screens in Concerto that manage SASE gateway policy. Clicking it validates the pending configuration and pushes it to the associated devices or gateways; a Tasks icon lets the administrator track the push as it runs, and each target reports back a per-device status such as Success, Failed, or In-progress.

If validation finds a conflict – for example, a rule that a template expects to update no longer exists on the device – that specific device is skipped rather than blocking the rest of the push. Skipped or failed devices can be republished individually or in bulk once the underlying issue is resolved, without having to redo the whole operation.

Types of publish operations

Device template (mass) publish pushes a device template’s configuration to every device attached to it in one operation, replacing the corresponding device-level settings; it cannot target SASE or multitenant gateways. Service template publish applies a service-specific configuration across many devices at once; unlike a device template, the change is not retained inside the service template itself once published, and the associated device list only populates after the first publish. Versa Endpoint Client Template publish is narrower still – when a VRF is attached to terminate an IPsec tunnel, publishing that configuration reaches only the remote access VPN service, not the rest of the organization. SASE gateway publish runs from the Configure > SSE lifecycle screens and pushes candidate SASE policy to Versa Cloud Gateways, either one gateway at a time or across an entire region.

Publish & Versa

Across Director and Concerto, publish status is tracked per device: the device template and service template dashboards show Success, Failed, and In-progress states with a Retry Action column and a Device List that highlights how many devices failed, and a Tasks icon lets an administrator watch a push run to completion. For SASE gateways, the Gateway Publish Status page adds Completed, Failed, and (from Release 12.1.1) Need Publication states, plus an Unpublished Configurations diff view and a Published Configurations history that supports comparing and reverting to an earlier version – the number of retained versions is controlled by the SSE Maximum Publishing Histories setting under Settings > System Settings. Release 11.4.1 first added the ability to view differences between gateway configurations. See Manage Templates for the device and service template workflow and Publish SASE Gateways for the gateway-side publish, compare, and revert workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What happens when I click Publish?

Concerto or Director validates the pending candidate configuration and pushes it to the associated devices or gateways. Each target reports its own status – Success, Failed, or In-progress – so the administrator can see exactly which devices received the change and which did not.

What is the difference between Save and Publish?

Save stores a configuration change locally as a candidate, with no effect on the network. Publish is the separate step that validates that candidate configuration and commits it to the actual devices or gateways, making the change take effect on live traffic.

What is mass publish?

Mass publish is publishing a device template’s configuration to every device attached to that template in a single operation. It updates the matching device-level settings on all of them but cannot be used to publish to SASE or to a multitenant gateway.

Can a published configuration be undone?

For SASE gateways, yes: the Gateway Publish Status page keeps a history of published configurations that can be compared and reverted to a prior version. Device and service templates instead rely on republishing a corrected configuration rather than a one-click revert.

What does Republish do?

Republish retries the publish operation for devices that failed the first attempt – selected individually or via Select All – without requiring the entire template to be published again to devices that already succeeded. It is available from both the Retry Action column and the device list for a failed template push.

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