Turn Your Tribal Network Knowledge into Organization-Wide Automation
The operational problems that arise from tribal knowledge in networking create delays, and with the expectations put on today’s network infrastructure teams, they simply can’t get by this way anymore. Learn how network teams can turn CLI commands into reusable automations with Itential command templates.?
By: Rich Martin , Director of Technical Marketing?
Every network team has a wealth of tribal knowledge, typically locked away in the minds of the most experienced network engineers on the team. This knowledge comes from years of repeatedly working on the network. The tribal knowledge relates to every area of the network and how to manage it—deploying new devices, setting up network services, or quickly troubleshooting and resolving network problems. Because the knowledge is imprinted into the minds of those few who have it, they have become the network heroes and can recall this wisdom to swiftly execute a flurry of manual network commands and accomplish the task at hand, leaving everyone in awe at their abilities.?
In the past very little of this tribal knowledge was ever shared, let alone documented. What little was written down was rarely comprehensible to less experienced network engineers. This typically resulted in a call to a network engineer who held the knowledge, who ended up doing the work on their own as it would be faster than documenting and teaching a less experienced engineer. The result is that just a few members of the network team are capable of doing most of the important work, leaving the rest unable to do it themselves because they lack the knowledge. When day to day network tasks require this tribal knowledge to complete, the entire process is delayed until one of these few can get around to it. This causes unnecessary delays in completing routine network processes, and now that networks are expected to deliver their infrastructure as quickly as other IT teams, these delays have compounded—severely impacting the ability to quickly deploy new applications and services.
The only way to overcome these challenges is through the adoption of network automation and orchestration. However, as much as network leaders may want to shift to automation, network practitioners are faced with adoption challenges—a tremendous skills gap, a lack of time, and very low confidence in making automated changes to a complex network.
So, the big question is this: how do network leaders enable their teams, armed with decades of untapped knowledge, to not only share and document it but also to participate in building reusable and scalable automations that are available to anyone organization-wide using that tribal knowledge?
How to Extract Tribal Knowledge to Increase Automation Participation
While it may not seem like it at first, network automation and tribal knowledge are tightly linked together. Automations that can integrate these tribal procedures will more likely gain the confidence of the network team when they run. After all, it’s the same process that the network leaders use, and if they are the ones who have built the automation steps then there’s little question of whether they will work. The same person who called at 4 AM to help with a network issue has now helped write the automation that you (and anyone) can use to resolve the same problem, without ever having to pick up the phone or send a message.
Sounds good in theory, but let’s talk about how to put it into practice so you can help the network team document this incredibly useful and critical tribal network knowledge AND participate in building automations. All of this can easily be accomplished with Itential’s command templates. These templates are specifically engineered to enable anyone in the network team to understand and follow the same processes that someone might use on the command line of a network device.?
When you need to determine the state of a network device, think of what command you would run. Now, after the command is run, what part of the output from the network device would you look for? That common scenario is how Itential’s command templates work in their simplest terms. A network engineer can enter commands in the application, just as they would on the command line, and parse the output for the correct information to determine whether that command passes or fails the determined test. As the network engineer starts building these steps, they never have to leave the Itential application because they can execute commands on devices in real-time and see the output it generates. This lets them define the rules based on that output.
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These command templates may start out as a single test, but your network team will find that you can run multiple tests over the output of a single command, and string together multiple commands and tests in a single command template. Because this is a very natural method of expressing that network tribal knowledge, they will be able to create command templates quickly, test them out, and iterate over them without the need to learn to write any code — all while documenting it and making it available to other team members.
When teams adopt command templates, they are able to build automations that eliminate backlogs of network changes, load balancing, firewall policies and much more with confidence. This is not only a major time saver but it also helps teams ensure consistency and reliability across the network - no matter the domain.?
Leveraging Tribal Network Knowledge to Build Reusable Automations
Once your network team has transferred their tribal knowledge to command templates, they become logical assets that are used in automations. In a single step within a workflow, a command template can run on any device in the network in real-time, and it will return a pass or fail condition with full details on the device output.
Command templates can become the heart of a workflow that can be used for a myriad of network tasks: troubleshooting network problems, identifying whether interfaces are up or down, identifying whether routes exist or not, and building automations that run across many devices to accomplish time-consuming and repetitive tasks like finding where a MAC address is on the network.
As your automations progress into making network changes across different network domains, these same command templates will become critical in determining pre-check conditions (to determine that it’s OK to make changes) and post-check conditions (whether those changes just made are working and nothing else on the network has been impacted). Your core network team can participate in these automation efforts immediately without any prior experience in writing code and can rapidly build automations that the whole team can run, while feeling confident that they will execute successfully.
Seems too good to be true, doesn’t it? Let me show you that’s not the case. You can see it for yourself in the recent demo I did below, showing step-by-step how you can put this into practice and turn tribal network knowledge into organization-wide automation with Itential’s command templates.
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