In what’s been an exciting and busy year for Itential, we’re very pleased to share another recent milestone that highlights the impact of our innovation: Itential’s inclusion as a market leader in the 2023 GigaOm Radar Report for Network Validation.
Our position in the report as a “Fast Mover,” with a broad range of technical capabilities for network validation, is pivotal for “enabling users to incorporate validation functionality into other orchestration flows.”
This is the second year in which GigaOm, a premier technology research firm, has produced the Network Validation edition of the Radar Report. It includes analyses of a set of vendors noted as leaders, challengers, and entrants to the space, evaluated based on key criteria including features and capabilities, ecosystem support, validation approach, and flexibility. By presenting this in-depth analysis, the report aims to “equip IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements” as well as help leaders adopt effective, proactive network validation solutions.
Why Proactive Network Validation Is Important
Network validation “determines whether the configuration or reconfiguration of the network meets the design or intent of the network.” It includes validating the reasoning behind changes and predicting and then monitoring the impact of those changes.
As networks become more complex and distributed, the potential impact of an incorrect configuration or an unintended cause and effect can be significant. It’s important for organizations to adopt solutions that give them the ability to manage and oversee the complex networking environments they have today.
According to GigaOm, network validation solutions should meet the following table stakes, defined by the report as “mature, stable features common across all network validation solutions.” These capabilities are key to ensuring that network changes are consistent and low risk even as the number of systems and domains in the network environment grows.
- Automated pre-deployment checks: Proactive validation prior to the deployment of a network change to determine compliance with predefined policies.
- Automated post-deployment checks: Automated validation immediately after a change is deployed to determine its impact.
- Scheduled state validation: Scheduled validation to identify potential issues on a regular cadence.
- Automated trouble ticketing: Out-of-the-box integration with ticketing systems to automatically document issues with network state and expedite change management.
You can dive into Itential’s solutions for the above network validation criteria here and see it in action in this webinar.
How Itential Sets Itself Apart: Combining Validation with Automation
The GigaOm Radar Report describes Itential as “a multi-vendor, multi-domain network automation software company with a mature workflow engine for operationalizing network configuration, automation, and orchestration across network and cloud infrastructures.”
Our top strengths identified by GigaOm are our no-code, API-first integration approach that “extends validation beyond CLI environments,” and our “modular framework” that “enables users to incorporate validation functionality into other orchestration flows.”. Simply put, Itential enables your network team to build end-to-end automations for managing network changes across the whole network, providing the ability to validate network changes before they are applied.
The modular framework and our integration model also enable Itential users to easily leverage other platforms or systems for specific capabilities that Itential doesn’t provide natively. For example, while Itential doesn’t offer mapping or discovery itself, engineers can easily integrate their preferred solutions and then leverage tasks in their automation workflows that interact with those solutions.
Another key feature that’s part of this modular framework is the use of command templates, which can turn any set of network CLI commands into a reusable, shareable asset that can be utilized by multiple automations. Our customers use command templates to build pre-checks and post-checks, based on their existing network knowledge and processes, that they plug into many different workflows. This is particularly beneficial as it not only saves time in the short term but also allows organizations to expand their library of pre-checks and post-checks over time, enabling engineers to add more checks to future processes without increased effort.
Golden Configurations are another feature that really shows the impact of automation on network validation. Itential provides the ability to build robust hierarchical Golden Configuration trees, which define the current network and security standards and can be applied to your federated inventory of devices across all your network and cloud domains. Crucially, Itential is the only solution that makes this possible for on-premises networks, cloud-native services, and API-managed services alike, enabling teams to automate configuration compliance across both traditional and cloud-based infrastructure with ease.
As network and IT infrastructure continues to sprawl and expand across new domains and environments, network validation efforts face two challenges: an increased variety of different checks and processes across these diverse environments, and an increased scale overall. With the Itential Automation Platform, validation is available in every automation workflow, delivering a powerful preventative method to our users that can identify issues in proposed network changes across all components of their infrastructure — before they are applied to the network. Our API integration model means that Itential can become a central hub for managing network validation across the entirety of your network environment — on-premises, in the cloud, and at the edge.
The complexity and variety of configurations is going up, and you need a solution to match. Itential’s unique and innovative capabilities bring validation and automation together, enabling a new, more efficient approach. With Itential, ensure that your network remains in compliance, minimizing risk while maximizing uptime and performance.
Kristen H. Rachels
Chief Marketing Officer ‐ Itential
Kristen serves as Chief Marketing Officer for Itential, leading their go-to-market strategy and execution to accelerate the adoption and expansion of the company’s products and services.
