By leveraging the Itential Automation Platform, the airline was able to orchestrate the software upgrade process end-to-end. The team coordinated automations for pre-checks, storing and retrieving files, device config backup, post-checks, validated results, and opening and closing tickets in an orchestrated workflow along with the config push itself. This new process was designed in alignment with Cisco best practices and leveraged their current Ansible efforts.

In doing so, they were able to expand participation to their operations team, who could provide the specific CLI commands for pre- and post-checks to ensure all changes were successful. They were also able to expose automation to people who didn’t have access to execute Python scripts by exposing forms to other teams that could capture inputs with validation controls built in. With Itential, they were able to automate software upgrades at scale through our:

• Support for any network device or type when automating software upgrades, in one platform.
• Low-code workflow canvas for building orchestrated workflows that can coordinate automation steps across all domains and systems.
• Rapid integration with their IT ecosystem; ITSM, IPAM, notifications, and more.
• Ability to expand automation participate by mitigating the skills gap with our form-driven automation and low-code development environment.
• Robust pre-check and post-check policies with automatic rollback for managing Day 2 change management.
• Ability to leverage existing automation efforts in Ansible and Python, mitigating the need to rip-and-replace existing work.
• The ability to auto-generate integrations for in-house developed systems so automated activities driven by those systems can be incorporated in orchestrated workflows.
• Automation Marketplace offering hundreds of integrations and modular automation assets like data transformations and pre-built workflows based on industry best practices.