The future of network operations demands a robust automation strategy. Chris Villemez, technical marketing engineer, NetBrain, explains why it is necessary to craft a successful, long-term IT automation strategy.
As work and school shifted to the home for millions of people during the pandemic, internet services faced an unprecedented demand spike, underscoring the importance of network performance to businesses of all kinds. This, in turn, has made managing the complexities of network operations more vital than ever. The issue is humans cannot shoulder the burden alone for a host of reasons:
- We’re buried invaluable data, yet still lack visibility and insights
- Uptime requirements are more stringent (and important) than ever
- Our networks are constantly changingÂ
Can We Future Proof IT Operations?
With increasing network demands, decentralization, and complexity, the only realistic option available to IT professionals to manage network operations is automation. It’s a major shift for networking professionals, who are still managing network performance and uptime in very old-school ways. Many are still using spreadsheets, whiteboards and sharpies, and the command-line interface (CLI) to manage networks piecemeal. Because these methods are solidly ingrained, businesses need to tread carefully to ensure that adoption happens gradually across the organization to maximize the success of any automation strategy.
Remember that the goal is to create a buildable system that will improve over time, require less human intervention, and decrease TTR (time to remediation). This system must be able to apply automation to the smallest of problems or largest of problems, with the flexibility necessary to handle the unpredicted. As much as possible, this should be done with agile, low- or no-code mechanisms that can scale and accommodate a wide range of use-cases. Any automation solution also has to prove its worth by showing measurable results. It won’t happen overnight: assessment and planning are a must for a successful implementation.
See More: Decoding Intent-Based Networking To Automate Troubleshooting and Increase Network Uptime
An Automation Maturity Model for Network Operations
How should teams begin this seemingly insurmountable process? Developing a strategy to leverage the power of software automation starts with understanding your current IT automation readiness across the core areas of infrastructure operations. This is the process of assessment, measuring where you are relative to where you want to be so that you know when you get there.
Network operations revolve around three big IT needs – visibility, execution, and IT ecosystem. Analyzing each of these three needs and determining where you are in terms of software augmentation is necessary to craft a successful, long-term, and effective IT automation strategy.Â
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Automation for IT ops visibility
IT operations are built on reams of data, device configurations, network topologies, telemetry, metrics. Yet, I commonly hear from colleagues that they still lack actionable visibility to handle the common operational tasks such as ensuring network performance or validating security compliance.
Today’s infrastructure is multi-vendor and multi-platform. Heterogenous designs tying together cloud, software-defined, data center, and enterprise architectures are the norm. This results in technology and data silos, requiring vendor- or use-case specific IT tools and skillsets. Visibility and automated approaches should address all the fundamental areas of network management, inventory, topology, configurations, and design, and do so in a multi-everything network.
The first step is getting control of disparate data lakes to see the hybrid multi-vendor, multi-technology network as one network. If I have a network of Juniper, Fortinet, and Cisco switches, routers, and firewalls all producing border gateway protocol (BGP) information, software augmentation can and should be used to present a singular, homogenous BGP view of my heterogeneous network. An automated approach to slicing and dicing my IT big data translates directly into actionable things, such as knowing during a network outage whether my multi-site BGP routing design is functioning, if it is in the correct state, and if it is in a healthy condition.
The journey to automated IT operations requires the ability to normalize, measure, baseline, and record a variety of network-wide datasets, giving operators the needed full-picture visibility and data analytics to know if the infrastructure is healthy, to be able to compare historic data, and to know if there are unexpected anomalies.Â
2. Automation for IT ops execution
IT operations are most concerned with executing critical tasks that grow the business, keep things running smoothly and fix issues when things go awry. The goal of automated execution is to do more with less, enabling organizations to handle the continually increasing demands on the network efficiently.
The execution here applies to everything done to maintain IT infrastructure’s ability to deliver business services and maintain costs. The automation strategy must be able to address any recurring operations task, from the biggest to the smallest.
To accomplish this, scalable mechanisms are required that can, for example, automate device CLI and API for change management, incident or fault response, compliance needs, and so on. While each of these workflows is very different from each other, everything at a lower level is about communicating with infrastructure devices and scraping telemetry data to gauge the health and state of everything on the network.
See More: 3 Ways To Prepare Organization Networks for the Hybrid Work Era
3. Automation for IT ops ecosystems
Often neglected in IT automation strategies are the ITOps ecosystem itself, the tools, processes, and people that facilitate the maintenance of infrastructure service uptime.
We can apply mechanisms to automate data acquisition, baseline, and visibility, and we can be successful in automating task execution across infrastructure devices.However, without accommodating the full operational ecosystem, the strategy will still fall short.
This is because IT systems produce a wide array of data from a variety of systems, inventory systems such CMDBs, process systems such as ITSMs, and infrastructure management systems like health and performance monitors or traffic analysis tools. We cannot leave these datasets, systems, and processes out of our automation strategy simply because an automated NetOps requires full visibility to be successful.
The challenge is to normalize these different datasets even when they come from various vendors’ systems or tools. These assessments need to be made when stitching together the tools and processes needed to create an automation framework.
The Future of Network Operations
It’s hard to envision a future of network operations that does not include a robust automation strategy. The pace at which networks are changing today and the very dynamic nature of IT operations will make it imperative.Â
Critical to this success is an understanding of current automation readiness across the core network operations functions. In assessing and planning in the core areas of IT visibility, execution, and ecosystem, architects who properly develop an automation strategy for all of the network operations and enable teams to intelligently manage today’s disparate IT infrastructures will win by bolstering their networks’ ability to deliver on ever-more-critical performance and service uptime.
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