How a Major US Airline Implemented Golden Configurations with Itential to Eliminate Network Downtime

With the size and complexity of modern enterprise networks, challenges with configuration drift are extremely common — and they can have a significant impact on the bottom line. A manual approach to configuration management might work for networks of a certain size, or networks that only contain devices from certain vendors, but that’s not the reality for most organizations. And networks are only growing larger and more complex. So, organizations are turning to solutions like Itential, finding ways to reliably automate configuration management to avoid the slow but dangerous challenge of configuration drift.

Here’s a story of how we helped one customer build a new approach to configuration management.

Bad Configurations: A Growing Challenge

One of the largest domestic airlines in the US, responsible for over 134M passengers per year, faced mounting network configuration debt that was creating significant network downtime. With thousands of devices requiring manual configurations and updates, their network environment was rife with bad configurations that continued to accumulate. In the year before adopting Itential these bad configurations had allowed over 47 hours of production downtime during which passengers could not purchase, transfer, or refund tickets, and planes themselves could not take off. Along with the unquantifiable impact of a poor customer experience, the company’s direct estimates put each hour of downtime at up to $1M in losses.

This mounting problem eventually became untenable, and the company looked to invest in an automation solution. They needed a way to standardize their large set of complex configurations and then automate the process of applying the configurations across their complex and growing network infrastructure. To eliminate any configuration-based outages, they also needed to improve their security posture through configuration compliance audits and remediation. That’s when they came to Itential. We were able to work together to provide their network services team the tools they needed to execute proactive change management across Cisco routers throughout all 100+ of their airports.

How they Did It With Itential’s Golden Configuration Capabilities

With the Itential Automation Platform, the airline was able to set standardized configurations by implementing a Golden Configuration tree per location, dynamically breaking down network devices based on region, airport, data center, etc. Critically, Itential’s Golden Configuration capabilities rely on our patented federated approach to presenting a device inventory, meaning the network services team always knew that their device categories each included every relevant device. Further, Golden Configuration trees can be nested such that devices which exist within subcategories (e.g., all routers of a certain vendor, but only at one airport) can be further customized without affecting the parent category.

The airline’s network services team was able to set up automated compliance audits based on their Golden Configurations, which then allowed for the automated remediation process that is much faster than a manual approach. Using these capabilities, the company was able to climb out of its config drift hole—and now, they’re set up for future success, even as the complexity of their configuration and compliance policies continues to grow along with their network.

What They Achieved With Itential Automation

The company’s new automated approach with Itential also includes vital change management processes that had surrounded the manual network operations, such as opening, updating, and closing change request tickets. Even for those network engineers that had previously been writing ad-hoc, individual scripts to automate certain device configurations, the time spent on these manual steps before and after had kept overall process time slow. But with integrations across all their network and IT systems, the single application to build automations, and the ability to quickly reuse modular components between similar workflows, they were able to achieve 83% faster service delivery end-to-end.

With Itential’s comprehensive configuration management capabilities, the airline was able to:

• Standardize configurations for over 5,000 devices.
• Reduce configuration remediation time by 83%.
• Eliminate all configuration-based outages, every year since adopting Itential.
• Save an estimated $47M/year.

Now, the airline can audit against their network, run compliance, and then remediate and standardize 3,500 routers and 1,500 devices far faster than ever before while simultaneously removing the possibility of human error.

Interested in more real-world automation success stories? Take a look at this page to hear straight from our customers.