Today’s enterprise networks are complex – spanning physical, virtual, and multi-cloud infrastructure – resulting in increased demand to deliver applications and services faster, thereby increasing the rate of changes to the network. To meet these demands, many network teams use NetBox as a source of truth to help organize, document, and manage critical network resources and configuration as a logical first step. However, it’s not enough to just know what’s in your network. To really overcome these challenges at scale, network teams must also incorporate an automation strategy that can evolve from a source of truth to automating network changes from ticket creation to ticket resolution.
In this ONUG Open Session, Itential’s Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, Rich Martin and NetBox’s Technical Advocate at NS1, Jordan Villareal, dive into how IT organizations can evolve network operations through an integrated approach to automating and orchestrating at scale. They also demonstrate how to build an automation in the Itential Automation Platform that integrates with NetBox to:
- Query and retrieve authoritative data for network device configuration standards.
- Access network devices in real-time to determine current configuration and state.
- Automate network changes across multiple vendor devices to apply new standards.
- Verify state of network configuration and source of truth data.
- Data transformation and integration with IT systems like ITSM and messaging.
Demo Notes
(So you can skip ahead, if you want.)
00:00 Introduction & Overview of Demo
07:00 Creating Regions, Sites & Locations in NetBox
09:15 Creating Devices & Assigning to Region, Site & Location in NetBox
10:20 Building Configuration Contexts for Device Standardization in NetBox
15:58 Demo 1 Automating Device Queries with Itential
22:08 Demo 1 Automating Device Queries & Compliance Audit with Itential
24:31 Demo 1 Understanding Itential’s Data Transformation Tasks
25:50 Demo 1 Building Dynamic Configurations Templates with Itential’s Configuration Manager
26:58 Demo 1 Running Automation & Verifying Results
30:14 Demo 2 Automating Device Queries, Compliance Audit & Remediation with Itential
32:00 Demo 2 Adding New Device in NetBox for Audit & Remediation
33:29 Demo 2 Running Automation & Verifying Results
37:01 Demo 2 Reviewing Compliance Audit & Automating Remediation
