How Network Engineers can Operationalize Network Automation without Scrapping Existing Scripts

If you’re on a network team, you’ve probably explored automated solutions for routine network operation tasks and even built your own automation scripts, maybe with Python, Ansible, Terraform or other tools. However, you’ve also probably discovered that while this task-based approach to automation eliminates some repetitive work, enabling you to spend slightly less time dealing with day-to-day tasks such as configuration management, device onboarding and port turn-ups, it still leaves a lot of the surrounding work on your plate.

With today’s networks becoming more complex than ever, the time you should be saving with automation often ends up shifting into manual processes around the scripts you’ve already built—pre- and post-checks, data gathering from sources of truth, and updating change management tickets, just to name a few. This task-based approach leaves network teams with a collection of automations that needs to be manually integrated with the wider network and is not scalable in the long term. Teams need a better way to automate—one that doesn’t require reskilling, complex language or coding knowledge, and one that can be deployed at scale.

The Importance of Integration

So, a new solution to smoothly solve the challenges with network automation adoption? Sounds great, sure. But where does that leave the automations you’ve already built?

Seem hard to justify scrapping automations and the time spent learning and creating the scripts, even if they aren’t providing the payoff you want? This is where the integration-focused approach of the Itential Automation Platform really comes in. You don’t have to throw away any of the valuable work you already invested in. Itential can bring your network automations to a new level without asking for a wasteful rip-and-replace approach that leaves you back at square one. Existing scripts, Ansible Playbooks, and Terraform plans can be dynamically discovered and onboarded, showing up in the platform as pieces in a visual workflow. This way, the solutions you’ve already built seamlessly become pieces in a new, integrated network automation solution.

Itential’s unique capabilities not only let you keep your existing automations, our platform also helps serve up a simple drag-and-drop workflow on our automation canvas. This enables you to quickly build custom automation workflows and integrate with IT and network systems to gather and transform data and pass it to existing automations – all without leaving the platform. This multi-step, workflow-based approach saves time compared to the specific, task-focused automation that you already use. Existing scripts can be decorated and enhanced with a JSON schema that delivers an input validation layer, eliminating some of those pesky pre- and post-checks that take up so much of your already double-booked, triple-booked, quadruple-booked time (yep, even those urgent ones your manager calls you about at 4 AM). Plus, these decorations can be updated easily, enabling you and your team to efficiently change validation logic without modifying the original scripts.

On top of these enhancement tools, Itential also provides a full suite of validation and management solutions that enable easier and more reliable checks, configuration templates, change validation, and automated remediation and reporting. All of your configuration files will be housed in one application for easy backups, restorations, and configuration management.

Itential’s single-application, integrated approach to network automation puts the power in your hands. All the payoffs of scalable automation, plus the ability to both keep using and powerfully enhance the solutions you already use. If you want to get out of the endless backlog of checks, change requests, and manual configurations, download the full eBook to see how Itential enables network automation at scale.

TL;DR
If you’re a network engineer on the cutting-edge, you’re looking at the time- and work-saving benefits of automations. You’ve spent time and effort building automations that speed up specific tasks, but these tools all exist in a siloed fashion, requiring manual work to configure, update, and integrate them into the larger network. Itential’s single-application, integrated approach to network automation puts the power in your hands. All the payoffs of automation, plus powerful enhancement of the solutions you already use. If you want to get out of the endless backlog of checks, change requests, and manual configurations, download the full eBook to learn more about how Itential enables network automation at scale.