The Five Most Common Network Automation Objectives
Unlock network efficiency with automation. Learn the top objectives from NetOps experts.
Automating network management tasks saves time, reduces escalations, and makes tribal knowledge available across network teams. It has many applications within network operations. Song Pang of NetBrain shares the five most common objectives NetOps teams have for automation projects.
Empowering NetOps: Managing Complex and Heterogeneous Networks
As networks become more complex and heterogeneous, they become more challenging to manage and operate. The necessary skills and resources to do so are limited in availability and often expensive. But with a well-functioning network, modern businesses can succeed. Regular and necessary network management workflows can overwhelm the network operations team when executed at scale.
As networks get more complex, but NetOps teams stay the same size, they eventually reach a breaking point where they can no longer keep up with routine management or troubleshooting tasks. Hiring and retaining the resources required to respond to service issues when they occur and proactively looking for minor issues that will impact production services over time becomes unaffordable. This leads to more service tickets, longer problem resolution timelines, and, in some extreme cases, shutting down critical business services entirely.
Network automation is a new and relatively untapped approach to solving this network operations problem. Due to scale and complexity, it is ineffective for NetOps to perform many troubleshooting and network management tasks manually. Automating these processes can dramatically increase service delivery, reliability, and security while reducing tickets and decreasing the time necessary to resolve problems. When a network automation platform is leveraged as a functional action-oriented resource for larger NetDev projects (through API integration), the difficulty in maintaining complex multi-vendor and multi-cloud infrastructure is greatly reduced.
Recent advances in network automation have made low-code and no-code solutions that network engineers can use without needing to know Python or a scripting language. This has made automation projects more agile and allowed smaller tasks to be automated successfully.
See More: Top 10 Network Management and Monitoring Tools
The Five Categories of Network Automation
Overall, network automation has made it easier to codify what the network is supposed to do, how it should perform, and to capture all of the acquired knowledge to maintain it. Network automation projects fall into five broad categories based on the intent of that automation. Here they are:
- Problem diagnosis: Troubleshooting network problems is often a complex, time-consuming, manual job. However, relatively few problem types make up the majority of reported problems, so the challenge is creating a suitable best practice and then applying it at scale. Senior network engineers will know how to solve most if not all of these issues – so capturing that knowledge and making it widely accessible via automation allows lower-level engineers to resolve them more quickly and without escalation, reducing mean time to resolution and even cutting down on the number of trouble tickets submitted to IT.
- Network security: Most cybersecurity incidents result from configuration errors such as open ports, insecure management consoles, or devices that are improperly exposed to the Internet. And with the proliferation of mobile and remote devices, the attack surface for most organizations has increased dramatically. Network automation is the best opportunity to define, verify, and enforce security and configuration policies at scale. For example, one might automate a test to ensure the backup firewall configuration matches the primary machine.
- Outage prevention: Study after study has found that most network outages and security breaches result from human error. With network automation, it’s now possible to continuously verify network services’ operational status and capacity before minor issues turn into production outages. Automation allows organizations to preemptively fix configuration drift, failover failures, and performance degradation and identify potential security issues.
- Protective change management: Networks are in a constant state of change. And while traditional change management processes abound, they do so unaware of any application impacts that may arise due to that change. So, while device-level change management can be executed properly, the applications that use that infrastructure may begin to fail. Intent-based network automation enables the detection of problems with service delivery each time any device-level change operation is performed. Network automation verifies that all business applications in use will continue to be delivered as designed.
- Application performance: In today’s enterprise environments, applications can be hosted in the cloud or data centers and accessed by users across wide area networks (WANs), with limited visibility into application flows. That makes it difficult to isolate the causes of application performance issues. Network automation can provide a continuous end-to-end view of all application traffic flows and supporting infrastructure to ensure they meet designated application delivery KPIs.
Automating tasks in any of these five categories starts with the ability to describe any network in extreme detail and in real-time. To do so, all the device information, topology, traffic flow, and desired application-specific behaviors based on the needs of the business must first be captured. And curiously, once created, these behaviors can be replicated across the network because there is tremendous similarity in function types, even if the model numbers of specific devices vary from location to location.
Once this description is captured and replicated, these behavior intents become the foundation for scalable network automation, which the machine can execute tirelessly. Automating commonplace and repeatable operations makes it markedly easier to manage network operations at scale. Design compliance and adherence to best practices and established policies are assured through automation.
See More: Why Automation Is Doomed Without Process Orchestration
Enhanced Efficiency and Collaboration in Network Management
In the past, automation projects were more difficult to implement and reserved for only a few high-priority tasks. Tasks that only took a small amount of time (running diagnostic tests when a trouble ticket came in, for example) often weren’t considered worth automating. Many IT leaders also wanted entire systems to be automated without human involvement. In reality, this “all or nothing” thinking isn’t accurate. Low-code and no-code tools have made it practical to automate small tasks – any task that repeats often will benefit from automation. And automating just part of a process will still make it faster and less prone to errors overall, even if humans are still involved.
No-code network automation also extends the capability of performing certain network discovery and troubleshooting tasks to other IT team members. In effect, no-code network automation makes the detailed knowledge of the network and the operational experience of subject matter experts accessible to anyone. When developer teams look for the means to leverage the value of a no-code network automation platform, they quickly realize that the entire platform can be treated as a callable subsystem or object, essentially adding real-time network awareness and precision intent-based network automation to their ongoing NetDev projects.
What strategies have you followed to optimize your network operations? Let us know on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
Image Source: Shutterstock
MORE ON NETOPS
- Network Management: Why NetOps Is the New DevOps
- How NetOps and SecOps Collaboration
- A Guide to Converting Network Automation Skeptics
- Why Network Automation Is the Need of the Hour
