Integrating Network Operations Tooling

Being lucky enough to present at Networking Field Day events means that you get a chance to take a rinside seat in the discussion around new technologies and new ways of working in IT operations.

In this latest iteration (#NFD27) it was apparent that IP Fabric aren’t the only folk with an ecosystem vision – one where different vendors and services organisations collaborate to ensure their platforms and services work together, augmenting their own capabilities and those of everything around them.?I think of a jigsaw puzzle, where each platform is its own piece – and when they’re put together they create a more complete picture.

This has always been the case with IP Fabric:

• Our industry-leading discovery process finds all the inventory in your network and that can be fed into any system that requires up to date inventory and config data – CMDB, ITSM, monitoring tool, automation platform, IPAM, security policy manager.
• We can verify that devices are configured correctly to be integrated with other tooling: management configuration and authentication allows config and policy automation services to interact for example.
• IP Fabric can send webhook notifications to other platforms to trigger external events based on new snapshots being run or intent rule results.?And so when new devices are found, their details can be propagated, or new config issues uncovered a remediation job can be run in an automation platform.

Of course there are dozens of other ways in which the rich, accessible network data in IP Fabric can be used to improve network operations.

And so it is with our partners. For example:

Network To Code’s Nautobot project is growing beyond its DCIM origins to become a central authoritative database of intended network configuration data for network automation (or “Single Source of Truth”).?By building it out as an application platform, they have built plugins to:

• synchronise data between that database and external platforms (such as IP Fabric and ServiceNow) allowing you to ensure that the network data you have is accurate, up to date and consistent.
• Make a curated view of any of that data, from any of Nautobot’s sources (including IP Fabric ) widely available to whoever needs it in an easy-to-consume form using the medium of chat.

Nautobot’s most common use case is still as a source of data for automation but by reaching into and out to other operational platforms around it, that network automation can extend beyond simple network devices.

Itential’s Automation Platform offers a low-code approach to integrating native network automation capabilities, scripts written in Python and the like, and APIs into SDN environments and other operational tooling.?An automation workflow is created on a canvas in a drag and drop fashion and then at the interface between systems, data transformation rules are defined to ensure accurate mapping of data between systems.

By utilizing adapters that can be built for any API, Itential’s platform can be used to execute changes, validate them, send notifications to chat systems or logging platforms, update change tickets, and update external systems such as monitoring tools or inventory.?Its structure means that so long as you have a description of a product’s API you can introduce it into Itential and then build it into an automation, either using it to help with the control logic, transferring and translating it between systems, or using it directly in the rendering of intent as configuration.

The point here is the tools are BETTER TOGETHER – individually they do great things, but when you integrate them, you get the full benefit of their capabilities and the data they can share – genuine effort is saved as manual system updates are no longer required, data is pushed proactively to the troubleshooter, change validation is completed in more meaningful ways.

As we move into a world where “network automation” – or the push of config and policy from a central point – is almost table stakes, so we can see that the effect on the wider operational landscape of integrating tooling in an automated fashion can be hugely beneficial to any IT organization.?