Many organizations today operate a complex multi-cloud and multi-domain network. However, the network teams struggle with simplifying the management processes due to a multitude of disparate systems like ServiceNow, Salesforce, Jira, Remedy, IPAM, Ericsson EAI, and many others that make up their IT and network ecosystems. Manual processes, organizational silos, and the gap in skillsets are just a few challenges that impede enterprises from achieving end-to-end network automation.
Itential helps organizations overcome these challenges to create end-to-end network automation by easily integrating the plethora of disparate systems to its Automation Platform (IAP), leveraging REST-based APIs to enable bi-directional information exchange between external IT systems and network technologies. Itential Adapters are created to communicate with different types of systems embedded in customer’s ecosystem and federate data that can be utilized by IAP to drive intelligent automation across the technology landscape. IAP leverages the adapters to expose system functionalities as intelligent tasks enabling users to drive interoperability between legacy and modern technologies.
By democratizing the API layer, Itential simplifies your network automation ecosystem by providing a single, aggregated network API that connects tools within your IT and network ecosystems, regardless of how complex or heterogenous your network may be. It dynamically discovers functionality of existing controllers, orchestrators and network management tools by utilizing adapters to communicate via APIs with southbound systems in your network, listens for new requests, and learns changes made to systems in real time. By eliminating swivel chairing between multiple systems and processes, re-using capabilities, and coordinating across many groups, Itential facilitates your network automation strategy.
The APIs publish network data, events and notifications to the external systems, and consume information from the connected systems. The adapters trigger specific actions in the platform, while keeping dependencies separate from the business logic. You can leverage existing technology investments in orchestrators, controllers, network management tools and scripts to deploy closed-loop network automation that is fully integrated with your ITSM and other systems that operate northbound of the platform. This simplifies integration and enables network automation across complex, diverse and multi-domain environments.
Benefits of utilizing Itential’s Pre-Built Adapters:
- Instant integration into commercially available systems
- Federate data across multiple systems to drive automation
- Rapid expansion of existing automation to include additional integrations
- Provides flexibility to end users for data synchronization through generic implementation
- Drive interoperability different system types to drive comprehensive automation coverage
- Keep systems of record as the source to truth
Itential provides pre-built, out-of-the box adapters as well as custom technology integrations based on specific use cases. Itential’s Adapters span multiple categories to support true multi-domain, end-to-end network automation. If a required adapter is not in the pre-built list, customers can utilize the Itential Adapter Builder to easily build custom adapters quickly.
Adapter Builder consumes OpenAPI Specification (formerly Swagger Specification) to generate adapters with 100% or selective API coverage to meet the needed requirements. The adapters are created with linting standards, unit tests, and integration test that operates in a standalone (stub) mode, or can be extended to work with an integrated external system. The custom adapters also support integrations directly to IAP workflows.
Itential Powers End-to-End Network Automation
Itential enables you to move beyond siloed network segments to a holistic view of your entire network where automations and policies can be applied throughout, and devices/resources can be managed in real-time from a single platform. Itential’s low-code automation environment with built-in network intelligence empowers NetOps and DevOps teams to simplify and accelerate automation initiatives, drastically reduce risks, improve efficiency, and increase agility to launch applications faster and drive overall business value.
Check out Itential’s Developer Hub for a full list of all available adapters and see how easy it is to overcome integration hurdles and achieve true end-to-end automation.
Karan Munalingal
Head of Solutions Engineering ‐ Itential
Karan Munalingal is the Head of Solutions Engineering at Itential. Previously, Karan ran systems engineering at Ciena, focusing on carrier ethernet and core switching platforms. At Itential, Karan drives automation strategy serving global customers transitioning to modern networks and software-defined network programmability.