Autonomic network management is a promising approach to reduce the cost and the complexity of managing network infrastructures. It attempts to lead the human administrator out of the network control loop, leaving the management tasks to be performed by the network itself. Due to its important implication on automating management systems, this area has attracted a growing attention from both academia and industry. In this paper, we provide a holistic view of autonomic architecture proposals and the evaluation metrics existing so far. Based on this, we identify some new criteria important to the autonomic architectures. Finally, we compare different existing autonomic architectures and describe the pros and cons of each one regarding to the network management and performances.