How Automation Solves the ITSM Integration Challenges with Network Configuration

IT service management (ITSM) includes activities to design, plan, deliver, operate, and control IT services. Typically, these activities require help from the network team related to activities involved in the end-to-end network management process such as change management, asset and configuration management, and incident and problem management. In order for IT and network teams to successful implement changes to the network, automation efforts must include integration with these key components. Let’s explore the various use cases and challenges most teams encounter when trying to implement automation of configuration changes and how you can overcome these barriers.

The Need for Integration with Configuration Management

Configuration management is a crucial activity for enterprise network operations. It’s imperative that any change to the network goes through the proper validation process to ensure that changes being don’t break the network or cause an unnecessary and costly outage.

When integrating configuration management with an automation solution, the solution needs to consider more than the single network change being requested. Automation must assess the entire network and the impact of that change. Current script-based network automations assume configuration management has been handled offline. This historically takes place through people logging into the system, entering tickets, notifying approvers, getting approval, and notifying the engineer to execute the script(s) needed to make the change. The lack of an enforced, programmatic control before the engineer executes the script is a security gap and exposes a risk for outages.

Network automation should understand that a change request is required to even begin the process. The automation will utilize APIs to the change management system to create change requests whenever a network change process is initiated, eliminating time consuming manual steps and preventing execution of the change until approved. Alternatively, the request can begin within the change management system and trigger the automation process via API, communicating the approval to proceed along with the initiation. This removes swivel-chairing between the change management system and the execution of the procedure. As the change proceeds, updates are shared via an API notifying status and completion.

How Integration Supports End-to-End Automation of Network Changes

An enterprise network is a conglomeration of connected devices and every device must be tracked as to its value, where it is deployed (if it is), where it is located (if it is not deployed), how it is configured, the role it is deployed to perform, and utilization of the device.

When integrating asset and configuration management with an automation platform, you must consider not only the device configuration, but also the deployed device location. For example, new device deployments pull hardware from a warehouse or vendor and deploy it into the network. For accurate asset management, the automation process updates the location of the device and the status of that device (in service, warehoused, etc.). Automation must focus on the end-to-end process by integrating with asset management via APIs for these updates.

Software upgrades, patches, port turn-ups, and service configuration all impact the configuration of each device. A key part of these maintenance activities is periodic snapshots of the device configuration. The challenge is managing the storage and lifecycle of the configuration of each device. A network automation solution does not just store this data, but instead federates data from the various configuration management tools and automates the routine creation of backups.

Network Automation Integration with Incident and Problem Management

Incident and problem management are responsible for monitoring the network and triggering key defined events to initiate incident and problem tickets. While traditionally a manual process, an incident in the network can easily trigger an automated workflow that re-routes traffic or makes a configuration change to restore network service until a more permanent resolution is implemented.

When integrating incident and problem management with an automation solution, it must have the intelligence to know what change to make in each incident. This requires not only integration with the monitoring systems, but also a full view of asset and configuration data. This allows the solution to take an incident, see what devices are involved, where they are, their configuration, what capacity levels they are operating at, and use this data combined with alarm and fault data collected by incident management to decide what should be done. Automation can be triggered based on this data to change a configuration, remove a device from service, add capacity, initiate a device deployment action to either replace or add to the number of devices present, or turn up additional ports. This fully integrated solution provides the beginnings of closed loop network automation and ultimately reduces network down-time.

How Itential Integrates with Everything in Your Ecosystem for Modern Network Configuration & Compliance

Script-based approaches can’t provide integration at scale, but taking an approach that focuses on the end-to-end process and data federation can successfully automate and scale network management so IT and network teams can keep up with the current pace of change.

To solve ITSM integration challenges, the Itential Automation Platform:

• Automated Compliance for Network & Cloud – Ensure your network is secure and reliable by combining automation and compliance, enabling operational consistency across both physical and cloud networks.
• Integrates with Any CLI & API Technology: Over hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations to systems spanning authentication, cloud, controllers and orchestrators, DevOps and NetOps tools, inventory, ITSM, notifications and messaging, SD-WAN, security, and telemetry and analytics.
• Manages Data Through Federation & Transformation: Easily consume, transform, and federate any data or modeling language (YANG, YAML, JSON, and TOSCA), into JSON Schema for easily managing data for automations.
• Delivers a Network API to IT Teams: Leverage a single, aggregated network API that provides network self-service capabilities to other IT teams, enabling ease of consumption

Learn more about the full integration and federation capabilities of the Itential Automation Platform in this white paper.