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 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.

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

Individuals and teams that are ready to take the next step from networking and infrastructure task automation, are looking to evolve to the next phase of their network automation maturity – process orchestration. This takes automation a step further to encompass the full end-to-process surrounding networking tasks such as responding to or closing an IT ticket, performing configuration validation, and communicating with sources of truth.  

However, when assessing the best route to evolve teams quickly to this next stage, they realize that the tools which enabled their success in automating tasks lack the capabilities required to orchestrate end-to-end processes at scale. 

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

• Why teams should consider process orchestration and the benefits it can bring.
• The challenges and opportunities involved in the transition. 
• The challenges involved with moving to process orchestration from a task-based approach.
• Lessons learned by teams who have successfully transitioned to process orchestration.
• How Itential helps you evolve your automations to touch every part of the process with its patented integration capabilities. 
• The perspective of an engineer and what’s needed to evolve your automation efforts to encompass end-to-end processes. 
• The perspective of IT leaders and what’s needed to set your team up for process orchestration success.

Network Automation Maturity: Evolving Task Automation to Process Orchestration

The first step for every network team getting started with network automation is to create automations for individual activities. As network engineers start to investigate automation, their initial thoughts usually revolve around “what” tasks to automate and “how” they can automate those tasks. This is an incredibly helpful and useful first step into automation, and with the right tools and frame of reference, a lot of a network engineer’s daily backlog can be overcome. When these first steps are taken, it’s important to also find ways to effectively manage your automations and engage and collaborate with other team members around these automation assets.

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will share insights gathered from their time spent working with our customers who have implemented task-based automation successfully, including: 

• Assessing use cases, automation tools, time, and skills. 
• Expected benefits of implementing task-based automations.
• Required toolset capabilities to successfully manage and run your automations.
• Lessons learned from teams who have been successful with task automation.
• How Itential can help organize, share, and secure your scripts for extended use. 
• The perspective of an engineer and what’s needed to evolve your task automation efforts. 
• The perspective of IT leaders and what’s needed to set your team up for task automation success.

Network Automation Maturity: Evolving from Limited to Task Automation

As a network engineer, the fun part of the job (and what you were actually hired to do) is real network engineering and making the network operate more securely and efficiently. However, the reality is that making changes to the network also requires that we document those changes in great detail — both before and after the changes are made. Now that network uptime, performance, and security are more important than ever, process and documentation are also critical, and many times network teams spend more time opening, updating, and documenting issues in platforms like Jira than they do working on the network. 

By integrating the Itential Automation Platform with the Jira Work Management platform, network teams can reclaim valuable time by automating these manual steps, freeing them up to continue to improve the network and positively impact everything that utilizes the infrastructure.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Technical Marketing Engineer at itential, will show step-by-step how to save time and effort by automating the change management process that surround network changes as well as the changes themselves:

• Generate an integration to Jira Work Management Cloud Platform.
• Create new issues and set initial fields using a Data Transformation.
• Update comments on issues with network details captured from pre- and post-check tasks.
• Automate transitions to progress an issue’s status from open to completion.

How to Integrate Jira with Itential to Automate Change Management Process

Overall adoption of network automation and orchestration has grown steadily in the past few years, but within and across an organization, the rate of adoption can vary greatly. Clear patterns have begun to emerge. Individuals begin with scripts to automate tasks. Those can then grow into larger automations, usually with team-wide participation, and in some cases evolve into end-to-end orchestrations and self-service. As the approach to automation evolves, its benefits can expand in scope across the organization. 

Based on direct experience working with hundreds of teams and the observations of thousands of projects across the community, Itential experts have developed the Network Automation & Orchestration Maturity Model. The purpose of the model is to define consistent stages that can be used to measure progress in automation and orchestration teams and initiatives, which will help engineers and business leaders alike to maximize the impact of automation and orchestration. 

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

• Why maturity models matter in emerging technology areas. 
• How engineers and teams can use the maturity model to improve their successes in automation. 
• How business leaders can use the maturity model to measure their current capabilities and improve their long-term automation strategies.

Intro to the Network Automation Maturity Model: How to Assess Where You Are

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

With network automation and orchestration gaining momentum, network teams are beginning to realize initial benefits in productivity and efficiency gains. At the same time, they are learning about the very real limitations of some of their automation tools to scale across different technologies and integrate with the network domains, systems, tools, and portals within their own environment. 

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Karan Munalingal, Head of Solutions Engineering, will discuss Itential’s patented innovations in integration, federation, and data transformation that are enabling network and IT teams to break through the limitations of point solutions to begin automating and orchestrating at scale.

During the session, Morgan and Karan will discuss:

• Limitations of domain specific tools and why they should only be one part of your automation strategy.
• How Itential’s two recently granted patents unlock the ability to extend the benefits of orchestration across technologies and domains.
• How teams can evolve their automation and orchestration strategies to accelerate business value and unlock new opportunities.

Itential’s Patented Integration Accelerates Network Automation & Orchestration

Enterprise networking has undergone several recent periods of transformation regardless of the scale of network infrastructure and how automation is implemented. The earliest evolution was on-premises automation with tooling like Python, Ansible, and Jenkins. Then the rise of cloud-native networking expanded the scope for connectivity beyond sites, data centers, and SD-WAN, right into the cloud itself. Going forward, we see an evolving enterprise architecture pattern that includes use of multi-cloud network environments and a wide variety of integration with clients & technology partners securely, creating new challenges to solve.

For S&P Global, the journey to multi-cloud networking has highlighted the necessity for an innovative approach, while at the same time, it presents exciting opportunities. Using pioneering technologies like Itential for network automation, and Alkira for connecting their multi-cloud networks, S&P Global has been able to transform into industry-leading network architecture pattern. They also fully leveraged abstraction and orchestration capabilities to make the most of the flexibility of a multi-cloud and solved challenges related to agility, integration, and security. 

In this live webinar, speakers from S&P Global, Alkira, and Itential will walk through how S&P uses Cloud Networking-as-a-Service to dramatically simplify multi-cloud network architecture and introduce scale at an unprecedented pace with automation and orchestration, and how business and tech leaders can understand:
• The importance of the integration layers for future-proofing network solutions and enabling business for the future.
• Why it’s critical to ensure network technology decisions are driven by business and technology needs, not cost, technical debt, or integration challenges.
• How to approach security, as networks continue to grow and change.

S&P Global’s Multi-Cloud Network Transformation Journey With Itential & Alkira

Network and security teams spend time daily creating and updating security rules on Palo Alto firewalls to control network access to different applications and services. In many organizations, the rate of change is very high and making these changes manually takes a significant amount of time, creating a backlog of work that prevents users from accessing much needed applications and services. Automating these manual processes are critical to overcome this bottleneck, but interfacing with Panorama APIs is a daunting task with traditional automation tools.

The Itential Automation Platform provides network teams with a unified, integrated set of tools to quickly build automations for every network domain, including the day-to-day creation and changes of firewall rules. By leveraging the freely available resources in Itential’s Pre-Built Collection along with the platform’s low-code workflow canvas, network teams can automate these processes to reduce change backlog and deliver service connectivity more efficiently.

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

• Utilize Itential’s Pre-Built Adapter for rapid integration to Palo Alto’s Panorama.
• Review and utilize a JSON Form for user input.
• Review and utilize a Data Transformation for an API call to Panorama.
• Create a workflow to automate Rule Creation using these assets together.
• Publish the workflow and run the automation, using a JSON Form for data input.

Automating Palo Alto Panorama Security Rule Creation with Itential

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

Networks are more distributed than ever, resulting in a more complex set of compliance policies and configuration tasks. The good news is, controllers, orchestrators and cloud-based network solutions have adopted APIs, providing the ability to manage configuration and compliance across hybrid infrastructure.  

To ensure your API-managed network elements are configured securely and optimally through a lifetime of changes, network teams need a modern set of compliance tools that can utilize APIs and operate on the resulting configuration data.  

Watch this live demo to learn about a solution to consider in this vein—Itential Automation Platform with robust API compliance capabilities—and how to:
• Review onboarded APIs and identify API methods to use for compliance. 
• Build a Golden Configuration template for the API calls. 
• Configure different rules to evaluate keys and values for a JSON-based configuration.  
• Use a workflow to schedule a recurring automated compliance check with reporting.

How to Enforce Configuration Compliance for Any API-Managed Network

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

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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