Name: Automation Journey for Network Engineers: From Simple Scripts to Self-Service
Start: 2022-12-07T17:00:00Z
End: 2022-12-07T18:06:18.000Z
Location: BrightTALK
Rating: 0

Itential is the only automation platform built to support both network and cloud, making it easy for enterprise organizations to maintain network compliance, reduce manual operations, and simplify network management. The Itential Automation Platform is a low-code cloud-native SaaS solution that seamlessly connects IT systems with network technologies for end-to-end network configuration, compliance, and automation.

Getting started with automating network infrastructure requires a logical, step-by-step approach. You should start simple with a relevant use case and translate the process into a series of logical tasks. Then, you can build out integrations and surrounding processes to ensure it works with your infrastructure and meets your standards. Last, you will implement your tasks until the workflow is complete.

In the second part of this demo series on how to build automated workflows with Itential, we will continue to build upon the workflow from the previous demo. To extend and enhance the simple workflow, we will incorporate pre-check and post-check processes, along with evaluations and conditional tasks that allow more work to be automated with confidence.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you step-by-step how to:

• Build pre-check and post-check tasks into a network automation.
• Parse and evaluate result data from previous tasks.
• Integrate with IT systems to access data for the automation (IPAM).
• Format and translate data between tasks using Data Transformations.
• Run and test the workflow as part of the building process.

Building Network Automations: How to Add Pre-Checks, Post-Checks, & Evaluations

Getting started with automating network infrastructure requires a logical, step-by-step approach. You should start simple with a relevant use case and translate the process into a series of logical tasks. Then, you can build out integrations and surrounding processes to ensure it works with your infrastructure and meets your standards. Last, you will implement your tasks until the workflow is complete.

In the first part of this demo series on how to build automated workflows with Itential, we will “start simple” by identifying a common networking use case and leveraging Itential’s low-code, visual canvas to build a workflow that supports that use case. We will define the logical steps of the workflow using “stub” tasks as placeholders, and then eventually replace those temporary stub tasks with active tasks to create an automation that’s ready to deploy.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you step-by-step how to:

• Stub out an initial workflow for a simple network automation.
• Choose and configure tasks for CLI or API network solutions.
• Generate and validate input for the workflow via a form.
• Format and translate data between tasks using Data Transformations.
• Run and test the workflow as part of the building process.

Building Network Automations: How to Create Logical Steps for Your Use Case

Itential continues to develop features and functionality to help network teams at every level of their automation journey; from teams just getting started building their first automations to teams that are already proficient in using Itential to build, test, and publish network automations for self-service.

With the 23.1 release of the Itential Automation Platform, Itential is making it even easier for network teams to deliver and scale automations. Redefined and rebuilt from the ground up, Itential’s new automation workflow canvas ensures the best possible user experience while ensuring full compatibility with any previously created workflows. New features and enhancements to Itential’s Automation Studio such as rich context menus, keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to snap-to-grid and free-float make building workflows more intuitive. 

Additionally, these features make it easier to read and comprehend workflows built by someone else, further enabling cross-team collaboration and enabling network automation efforts to scale. Join us for a live webinar as we dive into the new features and capabilities in our latest release including: 

• Walk through of the redesigned workflow canvas. 
• Using new tools and features to build workflows more efficiently.
• Demonstrating backward compatibility and collaboration enhancements.
• Managing Jobs with improved automation execution visualization.

Building Network Automations: Introduction to Itential’s New Workflow Canvas

Selecting a network automation and orchestration solution that meets your organization’s needs can be difficult. As the number of tools that claim to enable network automation increases, it’s becoming more complex to determine the capabilities you need and select the right tool for the right job.

When adopting a network automation solution, your organization needs to be sure that the investment is worthwhile — many options have challenging limitations which may only become clear down the line. That’s why it’s critical for organizations to understand what they’re trying to automate and build a cohesive strategy around it, so they can evaluate the right network automation solution to achieve their goals.

In this webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy at Itential, will share how organizations can evaluate the right network automation solution to implement for success. You’ll learn:  

• How to define the network change process and build an automation strategy that supports your business needs. 
• Which capabilities you should expect of any modern solution to help expose, enhance, and extend your automations.
• The 10 most important criteria to consider when comparing and evaluating your network automation options and the right questions to ask for each. 
• Red flags to avoid and why.

Evaluating Network Automation Solutions: Top Criteria to Consider

It is becoming more common for network teams to be responsible for cloud-based networking as well as traditional on-premises networking, with cloud platforms like AWS now a critical part of IT infrastructure for many organizations. However, automating across both traditional and cloud networking can be difficult, as teams often think a different set of tools will be required for automation in each domain. 

The Itential Automation Platform provides network teams with a unified, integrated set of tools to quickly build automations for every network domain, including the deployment and day-to-day changes of cloud infrastructure. By leveraging the freely available resources in Itential’s Pre-Built Library along with the platform’s low code workflow canvas, network teams can build automations that work across both cloud and data center networks all from one place. 

In this live demo, Jerry Dollens, Senior Solutions Architect at Itential, will show you step-by-step how to:

• Utilize Itential’s Pre-Built Library for rapid integration to AWS Cloud Platform.
• Build and test Data Transformations to format data for API calls.
• Create a workflow to provision a new VPC and EC2 instance.
• Publish the workflow and run the automation, using a JSON Form for data input.

Automating AWS Cloud Infrastructure with Itential

When network teams start automating their manual processes, most of the focus is put on successfully automating the specific network change itself. While this is important, one often overlooked aspect is the data gathering processes required to automate a network change. For example, data gathering can occur at multiple points of the automated process — at the beginning when requesting data such as an IP address from an IPAM, as part of a pre-check process to ensure that conditions are correct for a network change, or as part of a post-check process to verify that conditions are correct after a network change has been made.

Without automating the data gathering process within an automated process workflow, network teams find that even though they can automate network changes, they still spend a lot of time performing manual processes, gathering data from IPAMs, network controllers, and other IT systems. The Itential Automation Platform simplifies and normalizes these processes so network teams can gather required data from all their network devices, controllers, and IT systems for use in a workflow.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you how Itential Automation Platform users can:

• Use Command Templates to gather data using CLI methods.
• Gather data using API methods from an onboarded integration.
• Create a Data Transformation to handle return data and formatting.
• Implement and test multi-layered pre-check and post-check workflows.

Automating Data Gathering Processes from CLI & API Sources as Part a Workflow

Network teams are spending more and more time building automations for their day-to-day tasks – scripts and other assets that are intended to be used personally, or among a very small group of trusted team members. However, most are seeing the need to expand the audience who can run these automations to increase the efficiency of their organization’s IT operations. This can be accomplished by exposing what the team has already built to other applications and platforms. The question is, how can you do this safely at scale? 

To do this successfully, network teams need a platform that enables them to quickly create network automations that they trust, and securely publish these automations to be consumed by other teams, applications, and platforms. The Itential Automation Platform provides all the tools needed for network teams to confidently build and expose their network automations as services that can be run from IT systems like ServiceNow or as part of a DevOps Pipeline.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you step-by-step how to:

• Build and publish a workflow for use by the network team.
• Build and publish a workflow for use by end users in ServiceNow. 
• Build and publish a workflow for use in a DevOps pipeline.
• Utilize Operations Manager for access control, data validation, and job auditing.

How to Publish & Expose Network Automations as a Service to Accelerate Adoption

Networking teams have been able to accelerate their ability to provide network services by focusing on new initiatives that include CI/CD pipeline integration and infrastructure as code. This has improved both their efficiency and accuracy of network changes. However, they’re now trying to take the next logical step – adopting DevOps principles and processes and applying them to their automation infrastructure components. 

As teams progress into this stage, they learn that a growing automation asset base (workflows, scripts, templates, etc.) presents the same challenges as overseeing a DevOps code base. It requires careful management, source control, versioning, and consistent deployment models to ensure the overall automation infrastructure is performing properly and in a scalable fashion. This means network teams should start managing their automation assets like DevOps teams manage their source code. 

In this webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy at Itential, and Mitch Veazy, Automation Engineer at Itential, will demonstrate a proven framework on how to implement a CI/CD approach for automation and orchestration assets leveraging the Itential Automation Platform (IAP) and open source components. They will also share and demo techniques and best practices for automation design and implementation that will enable teams to maximize the benefits of incorporating these principles into their automation development processes.

How to Apply DevOps Source Control & Promotion Principles to Network Automations

In order to have confidence in what you’re automating, network teams need the ability to deliver structured and validated input data to a network automation. One of the fundamental components of the Itential Automation Platform is JSON Forms, which does just that. These forms can be quickly created using a low-code, drag-and-drop canvas, tested, and used with an automation. One unique feature of Itential’s JSON Forms that makes this possible is the ability to populate data from a drop-down form element using a dynamic API call. This provides an additional set of guardrails to validate input to the data provided to an automation and using dynamic API calls within a form ensures that the most up to date and valid data is presented to a user before an automation is run. 

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you step-by-step how to:

• Demonstrate building and testing of JSON Forms using a visual, low-code canvas.
• Implement API calls to populate data dynamically data in drop down elements.
• Access data from API calls within the Itential platform.
• Access data from API calls to external systems like ITSMs or IPAMs. 
• Utilize Dynamic JSON Forms in an Itential workflow and from ServiceNow.

Build Confidence in Network Automations with Itential’s Dynamic JSON Forms

Network infrastructure has in most cases been managed using traditional, manually driven methods. This approach is poorly equipped to handle the widening demands placed upon network infrastructure to deliver connectivity at scale and speed while maintaining security. Network engineering teams who want to get ahead are looking to the robust, mature model of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), pioneered by application development teams, to improve their processes for network creation and management.

These forward-looking engineers aim to leverage pipelines to manage network code, enhance testing processes, and improve the consistency of their network management process. The adoption of CI/CD process to network engineering varies – some teams have implemented their pipelines, while others are still at an earlier stage of the journey, still looking for a roadmap to guide their implementation efforts.

In this webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy at Itential, and Joksan Flores, Solutions Engineer at Itential, will demonstrate a phased approach to implementing a NetDevOps pipeline using popular CI/CD tools and the Itential Automation Platform. They will also share tried-and-true techniques and best practices that have enabled networking pipeline innovators to achieve greater agility, consistency, and scalability in their network management approach.

How to Integrate CI/CD Pipelines into Network Automation & Orchestration

Creating programming logic to work with the tremendous amount of data that must be parsed and generated as part of an automation workflow has become one of the biggest challenges network practitioners face. As the number of systems involved is only increasing in today’s hybrid, multi-domain networks, stare-and-compare or copy-paste techniques are no longer feasible options to generate new configurations from a set of data. 

Instead of building these functions from scratch and maintaining them manually over time, network automation engineers can utilize the Itential Automation Platform’s template features that leverage TextFSM and Jinja2 to visually create automation tasks that can parse data from device output and generate new data from templates. This provides you the ability to quickly create reusable tasks that can be used to build pre- and post-check processes, create multiple device configurations, or generate formatted output for use in other systems.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you step-by-step how to:

• Create, build, and test TextFSM templates.
• Create, build, and test Jinja2 templates. 
• Build pre-check and post-check processes with templates.
• Generate formatted output with data and templates in a workflow.

Creating Flexible Network Automations with Data Parsing & Templating Features

In the quest to accelerate application deployment, development teams are investigating ways to incorporate more sophisticated networking into their CI/CD pipelines. This enables them to move from a siloed model, where DevOps and NetOps activities were performed by different teams or tools, toward an integrated NetDevOps approach. 

Network teams, looking to simplify their toolsets and eliminate manual bottlenecks in their workflow, are leveraging the Itential Automation Platform in their toolchain to expose and provide network automation and orchestration functionality to their CI/CD pipelines. 

In this webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy at Itential, and Dan Sullivan, Principal Solutions Engineer at Itential, will discuss the options emerging NetDevOps teams can explore to incorporate a network services platform into their pipelines and demo how the Itential Automation Platform enables advanced networking functionality and streamlined application deployment across complex, multi-domain infrastructure.

Enabling NetDevOps Through CI/CD Pipeline Integration with Network Automation

IT organizations are tasked to deliver more IT and infrastructure services to their customers in ever-shorter timeframes. The only way to rise to the task is for organizations to build end-to-end network and infrastructure automations to replace traditional manual processes. However, this also needs to take a step further to scale the use of these automations across different teams in their own platforms. 

With the Itential ServiceNow App, network and infrastructure teams can build comprehensive automations in the Itential Automation Platform (IAP) and publish them for use by users in the ServiceNow platform. This certified application streamlines a normally complex and time-consuming integration process, making it simple to configure access, dynamically discover automations, and control which automations can be accessed by different ServiceNow users.

Join us for a live demo where Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you how to:

• Configure access to different Itential Automation Platform (IAP) instances from ServiceNow.
• Publish automations in IAP for use in ServiceNow. 
• Discover updated and newly published automations using dynamic API calls. 
• Access and run automations in ServiceNow using auto-generated forms.

Deliver Turnkey Infrastructure Automation with the Itential ServiceNow App

New technologies and capabilities are becoming available at a rate that far surpasses the rate that IT integration teams and standard bodies can accommodate. At the same time, internal stakeholders are eager to consume new network services in a variety of ways – through systems like ServiceNow, as part of CI/CD pipelines, or in the Network-as-a-Service model. 

Itential’s ecosystem capabilities have enabled the Itential Automation Platform to become the platform of choice for organizations who wish to bring new services and capabilities to market quickly, and to enable users to consume network services in whatever model the business requires. 

In this webinar, we will discuss and demo how organizations can leverage the power of Itential’s fully integrated automation platform that utilizes integration, federation, data transformation, and exposure capabilities to execute across all technologies, domains, vendors, and platforms. 

In this webinar we will dive into: 

• The Itential ecosystem model for network automation and orchestration. 
• How to maximize the investment in existing network automation assets by leveraging the Itential platform to ingest and expose scripts, playbooks, and plans to the ecosystem.
• How to integrate with any IT system and source of truth for end-to-end orchestration across all your networks.
• How to expose northbound APIs for streamlined integration to ITSM and ticketing systems.
• How to easily kickoff automations within Itential through northbound triggers such as applications, events and alarms, IT Systems, BPMN tools, or humans needing to make a change.
• How to deliver self-service network capabilities to IT teams as well as integrate within your CI/CD pipelines.

Maximizing the Power of Your Network Through Integrated Ecosystem Capabilities

Maybe you’ve heard about the “shift left” in technology infrastructure and development, but what exactly does it mean to shift left in networking? How do we build networking functionality directly into an application, making networking part of the software development process itself and treating network infrastructure as code?

Join along in this live discussion with Scott Raynovich, Founder and Chief Analyst at Futuriom Research and Chris Wade, CTO of Itential as they explore how IT leaders can enable a true shift for networking by adopting automation as an operational model.

The Shift Left Movement & What it Means for Networking

BPMN tools fall short in automating and orchestrating network operations functions as they are designed for graphically representing business processes, not network changes. However, there are added benefits of integrating the two together. 

Network automation tools like the Itential Automation Platform are designed to represent network and orchestration processes with features and functionality not provided by native BPMN-based platforms. Itential can easily integrate with existing BPMN environments to expose these capabilities to BPMN users. By integrating the two, teams can choose which platform is best suited for each of their specific use cases.

In this live webinar, we’ll explore:

• The difference between BPMN and network automation tools.
• The unique capabilities of the Itential Automation Platform that are not provided by a native BPMN-based platform.
• The 4 different integration options to choose from based on what provides the most for your business.
• The added benefits of integrating BMPN with Itential’s network automation capabilities.

The Benefits of Integrating BPMN Tools with Network Automation

Network as a Service (NaaS) is gaining momentum as cloud service consumers have come to expect their network providers and teams to offer the same simple level of accessibility they’ve become accustomed to in the cloud world. However, many have learned that delivering networking capabilities as a service presents significant challenges that don’t exist in cloud networking.

Exposing network services based on functionality like IP layer 3, core networking, optical, and functions like firewall and load balancing depend on a network infrastructure that can be managed and orchestrated across silos and domains with consistent, predictable capabilities that are robust enough to be exposed as services.

In this webinar, Itential’s Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy, and Travis Nicks, Solution Architect, will discuss the challenges of providing true hybrid, multi-cloud Network as a Service along with lessons learned from NaaS implementations in some of the most advanced service provider and enterprise networks in the world.

Join us to learn: 

• Key capabilities required to deliver robust NaaS.
• Challenges of orchestrating exposable hybrid network services.
• Lessons learned in enterprise and service provider NaaS initiatives.

Deliver Network as a Service Capabilities Across Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Network teams are all too familiar with the burden of needing to make a configuration change, searching for the backup in multiple places, only to find out that it hasn’t been backed up in months. To avoid these network inconsistencies and eliminating the time-consuming manual process, teams are turning to automation.

The biggest challenge network engineers face is how to do automation at scale, while also making it accessible by all. In this demo, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, Rich Martin, will be joined the gang on The Art of Network Engineering to take them on automation journey with Itential and show them how easy it is to go from simple scripting to self-service.

See how you can leverage the Itential Automation Platform along every stage of the journey:

• Onboarding and using existing automations.
• Automating configuration standardization.
• Integrating a federated source of truth.
• Enabling scalable enterprise automation.

Automation Journey for Network Engineers: From Simple Scripts to Self-Service

Network Engineer

Network Automation

Automation

IT Automation

Network Management

Network Architecture

Network Infrastructure

Configuration Management

Automation Engineer

Enterprise IT

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Automation Journey for Network Engineers: From Simple Scripts to Self-Service

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