Prioritizing & Selecting the Right Network Automation Use Cases
Learn how to determine, prioritize, and select the right network automation use cases for your organization.
Determining the Right Use Cases for Network Automation
Network automation success starts with the right use cases. Choosing use cases that are either too big or too small can leave your project dead before it even truly began.
It’s important to understand how best to evaluate and prioritize where to start with network automation based on the value your use cases would deliver for your organization.
Here are some steps to help you determine which activities may be the lowest hanging fruit:
- Which network activities currently consume most of your day?
- Which activities are you currently unable to accomplish because of a lack of time?
- What integrations with other systems are involved in these use cases?
- Are there any existing automations efforts underway in scripts, spreadsheets, etc.?
- What types of categories can you segment use cases into? (Ex. Regular maintenance, day-to-day updates, new application/service provisioning, etc.)
- How many times per day/month/year do we do this activity?
- How much time does it take to accomplish this activity?
- How much time does it take for the end-to-end process to be completed? (This would include activities like pre- and post-checks, making configuration changes, creating/updating trouble tickets, referencing or updating sources of truth, etc.)
- How much time does the actual network activity take (hands on keyboard) and how does that compare to the time spent waiting on process or systems delays (tickets waiting in a queue, human oversight, and approvals, etc.)?
Selecting the Right Network Automation Use Cases
Evaluate Requirements for Each Use Case
Network Domains
Today’s networks require automation capabilities that span multiple networking domain types from traditional physical networks, SD-WANs, cloud networks and more. Due to its complexity, once use cases are defined it’s imperative to then address the network domains to which these apply.
Sources of Truth
Today’s networks are more distributed than ever, especially when there are so many domains that make up a network. That means that the source of truth is both highly distributed and highly fragmented.Historically, we relied on spreadsheets and copies of databases and that sufficed when networks were fairly static. But now, networks are constantly changing. In today’s world with the velocity of network services growing, networks need to make changes on the fly, especially with controllers or orchestrators in place. So when you think about network automation, it’s critically important to determine and understand which sources of truth tie back to the use case you’re trying to achieve and the domains it applies to.
BLOG: Why Network Teams Need a Unified Source of Truth for Successful Network Automation
Integrations
Based on the sources of truth you’ve determined; you’ll need to build integrations with each of those systems such as ITSM, CRM and Order Management. The good news is that vendors on both the network and IT sides are all building out very robust integrations, and most systems provide REST APIs either under the open config banner or otherwise. So as the obstacles to integration disappear, you can build new integrations faster than ever.
BLOG: Why Data Integration & Federation is Critical for Scaling Network Automation
Business Value
By taking a bit of time to do some calculations on important business metrics such as reduction in human effort, OPEX savings, and end-to-end time, teams can fully understand the business impact for each use case in order to have a strong foundation to build their automation strategy on.
BLOG: The Business Impact of Network Automation
Jumpstart Network Automation Use Cases with Itential
Itential simplifies and accelerates network and cloud automation. Our automation platform provides an easy on ramp for customers to rapidly adopt network automation for all use cases. Itential’s Automation Marketplace enables organizations to start fast and stay fast by providing out-of-the-box, modular, and reusable components that simplify and accelerate network automation initiatives.
By utilizing Itential’s Pre-Built Worklows and Integrations, you can:
- Expand on your automation strategy by addressing new use cases.
- Customize Pre-Built Workflows to meet your requirements and needs.
- Mitigate integration hurdles, stop swivel-chairing and avoid proprietary vendor lock-in.
- Follow embedded best practices in driving an end-to-end automation strategy.
- Enable DevOps and NetOps teams to onboard automation principles quickly.
- Eliminate the backlog and focus resources on new growth and innovation opportunities.
Pre-Built Workflows
With Itential’s Pre-Built Workflows, organizations can start fast, onboard automation principles quickly and stay fast, mitigating manual management and reducing errors. Our Pre-Built Workflows are packaged and self-contained, and include all the relevant documentations, files, scripts, dependencies, and logical components that are needed to execute the automation such as workflows, forms, Golden Configuration tree, command templates, and more.
Explore All Pre-Built Workflows
Pre-Built Integrations
The Itential Automation Platform is an API first, vendor-agnostic solution that connects to everything and acts as an aggregated network API, transforming and federating functionality and data from existing northbound and southbound systems. With over 300+ out-of -the-box adapters as well as the ability to auto-generate your own to any system using our Adapter Builder, Itential simplifies integration, mitigating vendor lock-in and custom development hurdles for network automation.
Explore Our Library of Pre-Built Integrations
Get Started with Itential
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