Three Key Benefits for Automating Infoblox DDI Services with Your Network Changes

Network automation is really hitting its stride. More than ever enterprise leaders are interested to learn how they can continue to increase the adoption and use of network automation to drive more efficiencies throughout their organization. While the strategy is simple from an overhead perspective — just let a program make the network changes when someone needs them — when you get down into the trenches the viewpoint shifts.

Networks are tremendously complex and dynamic ecosystems, so ensuring that a new application or service functions correctly and securely over the network is more than pulling a single lever or updating the configuration on one network device. In fact, provisioning something new on the network requires methodical orchestration of changes to many network and security devices, as well as referencing and updating many different IT systems.

However, most automation efforts start with making simple changes to network devices by identifying the network “lever” they always need to pull. Yet this leaves a major blind spot of the benefits of automating frequently used systems like Infoblox. The DDI services that Infoblox provides are a critical part of the network automation change process, and without integrating automations to this critical piece of the puzzle your enterprise could be missing out on three key benefits.

1. Refund Time Lost on Data Queries for Basic Network Management

Time is the most valuable asset that has ever existed and in today’s fast paced world of delivering IT services, saving time is critical. So, how can automating Infoblox functions help save time?

Every time a request for a new application or service comes in, a very complex series of steps must be accomplished in a very particular and logical progression to fulfill that request. If your network team uses Infoblox, then this process most likely requires lots of time in the application in order to gather basic data – identifying existing network resources, allocating new ones, or updating new ones. Without this information, many network changes can’t even be made to a device. Meaning that even if you automate the specific device changes, a network engineer still has to manually interact with Infoblox on multiple occasions during this process and at different stages for every single request.

Cumulatively, this adds up to a lot of lost time that is especially hurtful as the rate of network requests increases. But when the process of managing network inventory is automated along with network changes, all of this lost time loading, clicking, copying and pasting, is refunded to your network team. This enables them to invest that otherwise lost time into doing important network engineering tasks instead of doing data queries and data entry over and over.

2. Eliminate Inevitable Errors of Manual Data Transformations

While it may not initially feel comfortable to admit, it’s just a fact that when properly programmed, machines are better than humans when it comes to retrieving and translating a set of data between applications.

When we analyze the manual process that most network teams follow with Infoblox today, there are different ways that errors can be unintentionally introduced into the process. A single query using an incorrectly entered device name or subnet can provide the right data for the wrong part of the network, and if a person doesn’t double check the result to catch the error, that data may end up configured on a device incorrectly.

But even with the correct results from a proper query, most of the time the data returned from Infoblox isn’t in the correct format needed to make a network change, forcing a network engineer to enlist their favorite tool — the text notepad. They copy from Infoblox and paste it into notepad and manually transform that data, in notepad, into the correct CLI configurations needed to make a change. Every step of this manual change can also lead to errors, especially when you’re facing a backlog of dozens of these changes, and doubly so when they must be done during the 3 AM maintenance window (and completed before 6 AM).

Integrating both interactions with Infoblox and the data transformation process into the automation will remove the potential for human error to creep in due to this manual process, which ultimately means requests are completed correctly the first time.

3. Boost Efficiency for the Entire Network Change Process

While the previous benefits are tightly coupled together (after all, automations do things faster with less errors), it inevitably leads to this third key benefit – ensuring efficiency of the entire end-to-end network change process, not just the change itself.

Integrating key network services, like those provided by Infoblox, into the automation process is the missing link that will make your automation efficiency skyrocket. This is an often-overlooked insight because network engineers will generally focus intently on how to automate changes to the large and complex set of network devices. However, they fail to see the bigger efficiency gains by automating all of the manual data gathering and manipulation that comes with those changes.

Without breaking the “can’t see the forest for the trees” mental mindset, network teams may not recognize that these manual tasks must become an automated part of the end-to-end process to benefit the organization’s overall efficiency to accelerate time to deliver applications and services faster to customers. But the only way to achieve this is for your network team to have the ability to create automations that integrate to frequently used network services.

With the Itential Automation Platform, you can quickly realize these three key benefits with our powerful no-code integration to Infoblox and other IT systems and service. We make these integrations simple, as network teams can leverage Itential’s visual, low-code workflow canvas to build network automations that can query these systems, transform data, and make network changes. To help get started even faster, Itential provides a freely available Pre-Built Collection of automations and integrations for both IT systems and network devices that your team can leverage in just a few clicks.

If you’d like to understand more, check out a recent demo where I showed how network teams can automate these common Infoblox manual processes and bring it all together with network changes into a single automation workflow or check out the full details of our integration here.