Name: Building Network Automations: How to Get Started Step-by-Step
Start: 2023-07-12T16:00:00Z
End: 2023-07-12T16:00:45.000Z
Location: BrightTALK
Rating: 4.7

Itential is the leading SaaS-based platform for hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure, making it easy for enterprise organizations to reduce manual operations and simplify network management from Day 0/1 deployment, Day 2 changes, and beyond. The Itential Automation Platform accelerates your journey from task-based automations to orchestrated processes. 

In our first two webinars, we tackled the challenges of sharing and scaling automations with Itential Automation Service. Now, we’re taking it a step further — into the world of integration.

Automation isn’t just about building and executing scripts anymore; it’s about enabling self-service, streamlining workflows, and embedding automation directly into your existing processes. With Itential Automation Service’s API-driven approach, automation builders can now integrate seamlessly with other platforms, pipelines, and programs — transforming how teams consume automation.

Imagine publishing automations to your ServiceNow catalog or embedding them in a CI/CD pipeline for continuous testing and deployment of network, cloud, and security infrastructure. By leveraging standardized APIs, we’re not changing the way you work — we’re making it faster, more reliable, and easier to scale.

Join this session to see Rich and Peter explore and demo:

⚙️ How APIs make automation consumable across your ecosystem of tools, processes, and stacks.
⚙️ The value of a fully productized, standardized, API-driven automation platform.
⚙️ Integrating automation into platforms like ServiceNow, CI/CD pipelines, and Itential Cloud for orchestration.
⚙️ Live demo: Testing API calls and enabling self-service automation with Itential.

Whether you’re a builder designing the automations or a consumer using them to streamline operations, this session will show you how APIs open up new horizons for advancing automation.

Register now to transform how your team builds, integrates, and consumes automation!

From Scripts to Services to Ecosystems: API-Driven Automation with Itential

In the first webinar ‘Eliminate Script Chaos: How to Build and Share Automations at Scale,’ we explored how teams can use Itential Automation Service to turn scripts into shareable services that bridge the gap between builders and operators. But what happens when automation needs to scale across teams and departments?

That’s when things get complicated:

• How do you manage multiple teams delivering automations?
• Can you ensure secure access, logging, and governance?
• How do you enable operators to use automations beyond just the CLI?

Itential Automation Service is built to solve these challenges. It provides the enterprise-grade capabilities you need to deliver automation at scale:

• Centralized management and execution of automations in any language.
• Secure access with authentication, role-based permissions, and detailed audit logs.
• A cloud-based service catalog to make automations easily consumable across teams.

In this live webinar, Rich and Peter will explore:

⚙️ Enterprise features needed to enable secure and scalable automation delivery.
⚙️ Common challenges builders face when trying to operationalize automations across teams.
⚙️ How Itential helps manage users, roles, and permissions to scale securely.
⚙️ A live demo of defining and sharing automation services for operators through Itential Cloud. 

If your team has struggled to move from automating a few scripts to scaling automation across an entire organization, this session is for you.

Register now and start scaling automation without the headaches!

From Scripts to Scale: Operationalize & Share Automations with Itential

Let’s face it: automation isn’t always as smooth as we’d like. You start with a simple Python script or Ansible Playbook to tackle network requests faster. But soon, you’re drowning in questions:

• How do I share this with my team?
• Will everyone need to learn Python/Ansible?
• Am I stuck maintaining every script forever?

Network automation often creates a divide between those who build automations and those who consume them. And bridging that gap can feel like a never-ending battle. That’s where Itential’s Automation Service steps in.

With Itential you can turn your scripts into services anyone can use — no coding knowledge or complex setups required. Automation builders can use any tool or language they prefer and create a service around it, while operators can securely run those automations without worrying about execution environments or dependencies.

Join this live webinar to see how Rich and Peter will break down:

⚙️ The real-life chaos of trying to operationalize scripts (and how to fix it).
⚙️ Barriers to sharing automations and enabling operators to consume them.
⚙️ How builders can close the skills gap and scale automation efforts with Itential’s dynamic execution environment.
⚙️ A hands-on demo of Itential’s dynamic execution environment (IAG) and connecting to Itential Cloud for defining and sharing services directly from the CLI.

If you’ve ever been stuck juggling the “build vs. consume” challenge, this is for you. Let’s simplify your automation journey. 

Save your seat now and make automation scale seamlessly!

Eliminate Script Chaos: How to Build & Share Automations at Scale with Itential

Most network teams leverage some sort of domain-specific automation, whether through open-source tools or controller-based software, to implement network changes more efficiently. But while automating individual tasks may suffice in certain cases, the approach is difficult to scale. Delivering infrastructure as a product for broader consumption requires standardized processes. Orchestration unifies tools, services, and automations across your ecosystem to standardize processes for greater efficiency and provides the basis to create composable, self-service infrastructure products.

With Itential, you can easily connect different automations, tools, and systems to orchestrate the process of provisioning of a new infrastructure service. Then, you can define, capture, and leverage stateful data to build and manage self-service infrastructure products using these orchestrated workflows. 

In this live webinar, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing, and Dan Sullivan, Principal Solutions Architect, will cover Itential’s stateful orchestration capabilities. They’ll explore how teams can easily build orchestrations while tracking product states over time, and demo how to publish reusable workflows that developers and internal customers can access through a self-service catalog or directly through APIs. You’ll see how to:

• Create workflows that orchestrate multiple automations as an end-to-end service.
• Extend workflows to integrate with IT systems like ServiceNow.
• Implement pre- and post-check processes in a workflow.
• Compose new products and build a model for instance tracking.
• Leverage workflows as actions to manage products using APIs.
• Detail and track product instances over time.

How to Orchestrate Your Network Automations & Productize Them as Services with Itential

In today’s IT environment, many organizations are facing much higher requirements for auditing access to applications and services. Due to the complex nature of today’s distributed infrastructure, enabling access to these applications and services may require changes to multiple cloud, network, and security devices or services. Not to mention, these changes must also have a clear chain of evidence and traceability of who made the changes, when they were made, what changes were made, who approved them, who was given access and when did they access them, and finally — is the access still necessary.

This information is stored in many different places, like logging servers, databases, ticketing systems with little or no way to correlate it together for reporting, query it easily for basic details, and in most cases the current state of the service access isn’t stored anywhere, making it difficult to determine if it’s still in use and how to efficiently decommission the service, given the multiple configuration changes that must be made across a series of different infrastructure domains.

To simplify auditing and reporting, enterprises leverage Itential’s Lifecycle Manager (LCM) to provide a central method of managing these important services. With this application, network and security teams can define and track details related to service access, easily correlating details together for the infrastructure, security, users and more so every service is provisioned, identified, tracked, and can be decommissioned easily.

In this webinar Dan Sullivan, Principal Solutions Architect at Itential, will demo step-by-step how teams can:

• Enable tracking of access services with network, security, and operational data.
• Define service states and use LCM Actions to update state details.
• Integrate with non-infrastructure services like ServiceNow for ticketing.
• Quickly decommission existing access services when they are no longer required.

Tracking Infrastructure Access for Audit Requirements with Itential’s Lifecycle Management Capabilities

Keeping your network secure is just as time consuming as it is crucial, and with Cisco’s Security Advisory Bundled Publication in September it becomes a top priority for most teams. It’s a perpetual responsibility for network and security teams to ensure that your network is not only operating efficiently, but operating as securely as possible. However, the rapid state of updates and changes in infrastructure makes it a challenge to ensure that network and security device configurations are standardized and maintain compliance.

If you’re still using manual methods to review and audit, you already know it’s error prone and simply does not scale. With Itential’s multi-vendor automation and orchestration platform, network and security teams can audit network and security device configuration and operational data using templates that can are updated by vendors almost as quickly as new vulnerabilities are identified. The Itential platform can then report and automatically remediate changes, with the ability to integrate with ticketing, inventory, and messaging systems. 

In this webinar Joksan Flores, Senior Solutions Engineer at Itential, will demo step-by-step how teams can:

• Create Golden Configuration templates for both network and security devices.
• Automate auditing live device configurations for known vulnerabilities.
• Audit operational state of devices for vulnerabilities using Command Templates.
• Orchestrate with notification systems like MS Teams or Slack for reporting.
• Enable self-service, on-demand audit of device configuration with APIs.

How to Audit Network Security Vulnerabilities from Cisco PSIRTs with Itential’s Automated Configuration Compliance

The ServiceNow platform is quickly becoming more than just a way to manage IT tickets — it's becoming the central hub for everything in IT, including infrastructure. ServiceNow teams are focused on building self-service portals and the underlying IT processes that can complete these requests, but one of the biggest hurdles they run into is how to bridge the gap between requesting network services and automating the actual changes to the infrastructure. Enabling this for the simplest tasks can sometimes take weeks due to lack of resources and complexity to coordinate between multiple groups.

With Itential’s deep integration with the ServiceNow platform, ServiceNow developers can build Flows that utilize Itential Actions that can directly run network automations in the Itential platform to immediately request network infrastructure services for a user. With this solution, network teams can focus on building and publishing network automations to be consumed directly by a ServiceNow Flow.

In this webinar, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing and Ankit Bhansali, Senior Solutions Engineer at Itential, will demo step-by-step how teams can:

• Identify and use Itential Actions in a ServiceNow Flow.
• Authenticate and run an Itential workflow from a ServiceNow Flow.
• Utilize a ServiceNow catalog for self-service infrastructure.
• Utilize Itential’s App to generate dynamic self-service infrastructure.

How to Connect ServiceNow to Your Infrastructure with Itential

Today’s networks are comprised of a mixture of network solutions that are managed by traditional command line interfaces (CLI) and API-based network controllers. As configurations change over time, it’s important that network teams have a flexible set of tools that help them manage these configurations to ensure they are adhering to current best practices and security policies to prevent outages and diminish security risk. 

Some of the most critical configurations use lists of elements, like Access Control Lists (ACLs), that must be ordered correctly, or they can lead to network problems. However, legacy tools are limited in their ability to define rules for lists that can ensure compliance. With Itential, network and security teams have a modern toolset to help quickly build Golden Configuration templates with rules to ensure list ordering, and then automate the process of running compliance audits that can integrate with your systems to orchestrate processes such as managing ServiceNow Incident tickets and notifying groups of non-compliant devices, and even automatically remediate those devices.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will demo step-by-step how teams can:

• Create a Golden Configuration template for CLI managed devices. 
• Apply rules for strict ordering for an Access Control List.
• Apply rules for loose ordering for a NTP server list.
• Utilizing restrictions for items appearing in a list.
• Automating and orchestrating compliance audits using defined rules.

Building Compliance Rules for Ordered Lists in CLI Configurations with Itential

Today’s enterprise IT organizations often rely on multiple public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, along with internal infrastructure to deliver services to their employees and to their customers. Securing these services across both public and private infrastructure remains a challenge for many organizations due to the different features, functions, and management interfaces different teams must utilize to enable a consistent policy, end-to-end, for every service.

With Itential, organizations can build and secure complex hybrid, multi-cloud services by utilizing existing security automations for CLI devices and API integrations into security services or security controllers within a single visual workflow. Over time, as these security policies change state, the Itential platform can track these details to help teams determine how different policies are deployed across both on-prem and cloud infrastructure.

In this demo, Dan Sullivan, Senior Solutions Architect at Itential will share real-world use cases on how customers leverage Itential’s integrations with public cloud providers as well as internal infrastructure to secure both public and private infrastructure. You’ll see step-by-step how to:

• Enable self-service portals to request blocking services for a suspicious user.
• Orchestrate security changes for services across on-prem and cloud infrastructure.
• Track security details for on-prem and cloud infrastructure over its service lifecycle.

How to Track & Orchestrate Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Security Services

If you’re on the network and infrastructure automation journey, you’ve probably found a tool of choice to create automations, and built a ton of different programs, playbooks, or plans to automate all kinds of different network tasks. These tools are most certainly saving you, and those who are using them, time and effort — which is great, but you have the suspicion that much, much more can be done here!

Building automations is a great first step, but engineers quickly realize that these automations still pose efficiency challenges. They’re spending too much time on all the tasks that surround that change – opening and closing tickets, gathering data, updating sources of truth, etc. 

The Itential Automation Platform provides a way to quickly stitch all of your existing automations together in an orchestrated workflow with out-of-the-box integrations to systems and services in your unique environment, a visual drag-and-drop canvas, and a library of pre-built modular components. This makes it easy to orchestrate your existing work together to build end-to-end workflows that gather data, make and verify network changes, and update systems and services.

In this demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show step-by-step how teams can:

• Orchestrate your existing Python, Ansible, or OpenTofu automations.
• Integrate with systems like ServiceNow, IPAMs, Inventory using pre-built components.
• Build additional pre- and post-check processes quickly for end-to-end services.
• Create a visual orchestrated workflow that leverages everything you’ve already built and stitch it all together.

Extend Your Network Automations through Orchestrated Workflows with Itential

AWS provides an impressive set of tools that IT teams use to automate infrastructure changes in the AWS cloud platform. These tools automate specific tasks and are often used manually, one after another, to fulfill a larger request. By orchestrating these tasks together and managing them as a service offering over time, organizations can respond faster to requests and more efficiently utilize cloud resources.

By using the Itential Automation Platform, IT teams can quickly integrate with any cloud platform, such as AWS, and leverage native APIs to build orchestrated workflows that can automate network and infrastructure changes along with other, non-infrastructure tasks, like documenting changes and managing tickets. There's also a simple process to define a service and track it over time to ensure that expensive cloud resources are properly utilized.

In this webinar, Joksan Flores, Senior Solutions Engineer at Itential, will demo step-by-step how teams can:

• Automate AWS infrastructure like EC2, Certs, and ELB to provide application scaling. 
• Orchestrate processes to include ServiceNow ticket management along with infrastructure automation.
• Define related details for the application's infrastructure services in a JSON schema.
• Manage application services through multiple lifecycle stages.

Orchestrate & Track Cloud Infrastructure Services for Application Scalability

In the fast-evolving telecom industry, launching innovative offerings and optimizing existing services is not just an objective; it’s a critical necessity. To accelerate time-to-revenue and slash fulfillment overheads, communication service providers (CSPs) must minimize the time and expense of introducing new services and fast-track the evolution from fragmented, complex, error prone and manually intensive processes to fully automated service fulfillment.

By connecting ServiceNow to your infrastructure with Itential’s new ServiceNow OMT App, CSPs can accelerate their time to market by quickly incorporating orchestrated network services into their new and existing products, standing out in a competitive market.  

Itential’s multi-domain orchestration platform enables CSPs to create unique services that can combine their network capabilities with third party services and capabilities, such as cloud, security, and interconnect. When combined with ServiceNow’s industry leading order management solution, CSPs can quickly define innovative new services with the ability to scale order volumes and meet next-generation service complexity.

Join us for a live webinar where Morgan Stern, VP, Automation Strategy at Itential and Karan Munalingal, Head of Solutions Engineering at Itential will discuss and demo: 

• The robust capabilities of the Itential ServiceNow OMT app for service order management. 
• What both ServiceNow and Network teams can achieve by leveraging the two solutions together. 
• How to create a service specification and publish to ServiceNow catalog.
• How to incorporate Itential-published services into customer services.
• How to place an order through ServiceNow for the new service and how to orchestrate the fulfilment through the Itential Automation Platform.

Orchestrate Service Order Fulfillment with the Itential App for ServiceNow OMT

Service Providers and Large Enterprises who view network infrastructure as a resource to be offered as differentiated services to customers will face challenges in managing those services over the lifetime that they operate. When a service is initially deployed, it will require multiple network resources to be allocated and configured along with customer, service, and ticket identifiers associated with the service instance. As the service moves from one lifecycle stage to another, this data can change making it challenging to track and update, and when a service is cancelled some resources may not be deallocated if updated tracking hasn’t been maintained. 

To efficiently manage a multitude of complex network services at scale, organizations need stateful orchestration, which is the ability to automate any network changes, orchestrate end-to-end service processes, and flexibly update and track a multitude of different data types related to each service.

Whether it’s tracking details of a set of network devices, like VLANs, IP Addresses or ACLs, or managing intricate network services that span routers, firewalls, cloud, and IT systems, Itential’s Lifecycle Manager (LCM) can help. With LCM, teams are able to leverage stateful orchestration to keep tabs on infrastructure resources, critical details, and current statuses for all services by using workflows to automate common management processes and keep resource information up to date.

Join us for a live discussion and demo where Peter Sprygada and Rich Martin will show you how to:

• Understand LCM’s Stateful Orchestration features and identify relevant use cases.
• Create a Resource Model for tracking data for a service.
• Associate a workflow to an Action that will operate on a service instance.
• Manage a service’s lifecycle process using Create, Update, and Delete Actions.
• Review a network service’s details and history throughout its lifetime.

Itential's Stateful Orchestration Capabilities: Deploy & Manage Network Services

IT organizations spend a significant amount of effort keeping up with changing application and infrastructure requirements, which often requires changes to network infrastructure such as firewall rule access, load balancer provisioning, etc. This process can take longer than anticipated due to manual processes required to coordinate between app, network, and infrastructure changes. This can create a serious time lag on productivity and velocity. With Itential’s latest release of its ServiceNow App, Application teams are now enabled to self-serve network and infrastructure services as a fully automated processes – bridging the gap between IT Apps and the network. 

This new release introduces Itential Actions that can be directly embedded in a ServiceNow Flow. These Actions give ServiceNow teams access to a self-service catalog that enables their IT processes to directly gather operational network data, request new network resources, or orchestrate changes across multiple network domains. This means that any IT request that experiences delays due to manual network processes can now be automated as easily as other IT resources, enabling you to deliver IT services at maximum efficiency.

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

• Publish an automation in Itential to provide self-service infrastructure in ServiceNow.
• Build a Flow that queries network inventory and operational data for dynamic use in ServiceNow.
• Build a Flow to qualify network resource availability for a new service or site.
• Build a Flow to provision a new network service as part of a larger IT request process.
• Understand how Itential Actions enable self-service automation through Example Flows.

Itential ServiceNow App: Network & Infrastructure Automation in ServiceNow Flow

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

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

Both on-prem & cloud network infrastructure are critical for companies to deliver services faster to customers, but managing & securing this important resource requires infrastructure & security teams to identify issues quickly & react immediately to avoid outages or breaches. Manually identifying these events from massive amounts of infrastructure telemetry data & responding with manual processes increases outage times & security risk. Infrastructure & Security teams require tools that can identify & prioritize critical events & immediately run automated responses across all infrastructure.

Today, you can leverage Kentik’s ability to collect cloud & network telemetry data & generate intelligent alerts based on your organization’s requirements. When integrated with Itential, these alerts can immediately trigger an automation for the entire end-to-end remediation process, which can include updating infrastructure, managing incident response processes, & notifying teams. Combining both platforms enables enterprises to build closed-loop automations that respond to security & infrastructure events in real time.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing, Itential & Leon Adato, Principal, Technical Evangelism at Kentik, will demonstrate how to utilize the Kentik Observability Platform with the Itential Automation Platform to build automations that rapidly respond to cloud, network, or security infrastructure events & update teams & critical IT systems. You’ll see how to: 

• Leverage Kentik to generate Alerts for AWS infrastructure & trigger an Itential automation.
• Acknowledge the Alert Event in Itential, extract & transform data provided by Kentik platform.
• Automate the Change Request & Incident processes in ServiceNow for audit & documentation.
• Validate data & automate logic to update AWS Security Group or determine another course of action.
• Update Infrastructure & Security teams of the event & the automated response in MS Teams.

How to Build Closed-Loop Automation in Response to Infrastructure Events

For organizations ready to take the final step in their network automation journey, they’re looking to evolve from process orchestration to self-serve networking. Self-serve networking exposes the process orchestrations already built to a larger set of end users, providing capabilities like Network as a Service via APIs. 

The business impact of this transition is significant. Organizations who succeed with implementing self-service can provide the best experience for end users and customers, delivering more services in less time across their complex hybrid, distributed infrastructure.

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will walkthrough: 

• How the transition to self-service networking becomes a benefits force multiplier.
• The components of a self-service model and the tools and technologies that enable it.
• Lessons learned by teams who have successfully transitioned to self-service networking.
• How Itential supports self-service with its northbound API exposure capabilities.  
• The perspective of an engineer and what’s needed to evolve to make your automations become self-service for end users.
• The perspective of IT leaders and what’s needed to set your team up for self-service networking success.

Network Automation Maturity: From Process Orchestration to Self-Serve Networking

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 fifth part of this demo series on how to build automated workflows with Itential, we will conclude by showing you how to publish a workflow in Operations Manager to extend the use of automation across your organization both for Itential users and the networking team’s end users. We’ll explore the four different trigger methods that initiate these shared workflows and how each can work in your environment.  

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

• Publish a workflow for self-service by another Itential user within the platform. 
• Publish a workflow with an API endpoint to run outside the Itential platform such as end users in ServiceNow or GitLab. 
• Publish a workflow on a schedule for recurring tasks. 
• Publish a workflow to respond to an event for immediate execution and response.

Building Network Automations: Publishing & Sharing Automations

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 fourth part of this demo series on how to build automated workflows with Itential, we will continue building on the previous workflow. Now that you can fully automate your use case end-to-end, it’s time to take it a step further and explore how you can build flexible and reusable content pieces that can be standardized and centralized for maximum control and compliance for end-to-end network automation.  

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

• Build modular child workflows for common processes that can be reused by other team members in other workflows. 
• Use a ServiceNow integration for common tasks like ‘Open and Update Change Request Tickets’. 
• Access MS Teams integration to notify teams of an automation’s status. 
• Leverage Data Transformations for formatting data between workflows. 
• Extend current workflow to use any modular, child workflows.

Building Network Automations: Building Your Modular Automation Library

Getting started with automating network infrastructure requires a logical, step-by-step approach, which Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, outlines in the following demo specifically focused on integration and data transformation. Martin will show you step-by-step how to: 
• Self-generate an integration using an OpenAPI specification file from NetBox. 
• Utilize newly integrated API tasks for IP Address requests and Inventory query. 
• Create a Data Transformation to manipulate data for network changes. 
• Build, run, and test the workflow using Operations Manager.

Watch the third part of this demo series on how to build automated workflows with Itential, as Martin continues to build upon the workflow from the previous demo. Now that your use case is fully built out with the pre-check, network change, and post-check processes, it’s time to add in integrations with the systems in your ecosystem and data transformation between those systems. This allows for a fully automated end-to-end process.

Building Network Automations: Integration & Data Transformation Best Practices

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

How to Build an Itential Workflow to Automate Any Network Change Process

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. This webinar demonstrates how to translate this process into practice. 

In the second part of this demo series on how to build automated workflows with Itential, 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 Get Started Step-by-Step

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Building Network Automations: How to Get Started Step-by-Step

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