Presented herein are techniques for creating a policy block comprised of a group of lines of rules/statements across configuration files for network devices. An algorithm is provided that determines when multiple policies are to be merged together into one policy. In one embodiment, data is uploaded from a network that includes a plurality of network devices. The data represents policy rules configured on the plurality of network devices. The data representing the policy rules is compared for similarities in order to group together policy rules based on their similarities. Data is stored representing a plurality of clusters, each cluster representing a group of policy rules that have been grouped together. One or more configuration policies are generated to be applied across the plurality of network devices using the data representing each of the plurality of clusters, while maintaining context of policy rule processing.