Network Automation with Nautobot and IP Fabric

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During one of our recent webinars, Paddy Kelly, Managing Consultant at Network to Code and Daren Fulwell, Network Automation Evangelist at IP Fabric had a discussion about network automation and single sources of truth.

Their conversation covered the key components of an effective network automation architecture, overviews of the Nautobot and IP Fabric platforms, and the benefits of two Nautobot IP Fabric integrations. This blog will provide the highlights of their conversation.

Top Components of Network Automation Architecture

Network to Code (NTC) has been building and refining network automation solutions for almost a decade.

Through this experience, NTC has found that an effective network automation solution has the following key components:

1. User Interactions: Determines how users interact with the network automation solution, including dashboards, portals, and ChatOps.
2. Orchestration: Defines how tasks in the automation engine are connected and coordinated. This is the bridge between the automation engine and the observability stack.
3. Observability and Analytics: Exposes a continuous flow of rich data from the network, such as the observed state and how the network is actually operating.
4. Automation Engines: Executes all the tasks that change the state of the network, from rendering configurations and provisioning network components to maintaining compliance.
5. Source of Truth: Stores the data that defines the intended state of the network. It should contain all the systems and databases that act as the authority for their domain.

Nautobot Platform

For those that aren’t aware already, Nautobot is an extensible and flexible Network Source of Truth and Network Automation Platform that can power any network automation architecture.

“The primary use case of Nautobot is a flexible source of truth for networking,” explained Kelly. “The aim is to act as an authority for network data and document the network with the source of truth.”

Along with centralizing network data into a single source of truth, Nautobot provides an extensible plugin system with REST APIs, GraphQL, Git, webhooks, Job Hooks, and more. This enables Nautobot to integrate with a wide variety of systems to synchronize network data both into and out of the platform.

The Nautobot platform also supports creating and deploying custom apps to handle unique network automation use cases. In fact, there’s now a growing app ecosystem for Nautobot, which includes the IP Fabric Single Source of Truth app and IP Fabric ChatOps app.

IP Fabric Automated Assurance Platform

IP Fabric is an automated assurance platform that gives organizations end-to-end visibility into their network within a single platform. This includes an inventory of the entire network, the observed state of the network, and the topology of how individual network components are interconnected.

“The role of IP Fabric is network assurance,” stated Fulwell. “This is basically making sure that the network does what you intend it to. Not just one part of the network, but the whole thing.”

Many companies rely on documentation, tribal knowledge, or guesswork to manage their network, but this fragmented approach is inefficient and time-consuming. IP Fabric automatically discovers this data and makes a comprehensive view of the entire network available to users.

Diving Deeper into Single Source of Truth (SSoT)

Organizations have many different systems that manage their network data, such as IPAM (IP Address Management) tools, configuration tools, monitoring platforms, and more. Data ownership and governance across these different platforms is complex, but ensuring the flow of data between them is crucial to support network automation.

“It can be difficult to maintain this network data because duplication can happen across systems and then you don’t know which one to trust,” Paddy said. “An aggregation layer can really help in managing that data and providing a unified API.”

An aggregation layer acts as a single source of truth (SSoT) that can streamline network automation. Nautobot offers an SSoT framework that has existing integrations for many popular networks and provides the APIs necessary to build custom integrations with other systems. This enables data synchronization into and out of Nautobot.

For example, the IP Fabric Single Source of Truth app can pull the network observability data from the IP Fabric Assurance Platform into Nautobot. By synchronizing data between Nautobot and IP Fabric, organizations can begin building an SSoT that provides a comprehensive picture of their network.

Nautobot IP Fabric ChatOps

Nautobot IP Fabric ChatOps is another app in the ecosystem that leverages the ChatOps framework from Nautobot.

The ChatOps framework is a highly extensible, multi-platform chatbot that supports Slack, Microsoft Teams, Webex Teams, and many other popular communication platforms. ChatOps allows users to easily query and receive data from Nautobot and the other systems integrated with it.

In short, the Nautobot ChatOps app enables real-time access to data in IP Fabric’s Assurance Platform, significantly reducing the time it takes to resolve production issues by network and security operations teams. ChatOps, therefore, takes network data management a step further by making the SSoT more accessible to the broader organization.

“The chatbot exposes self-service capabilities to other teams so they can access the network and see data within the network,” concluded Paddy. “To be able to see comprehensive network data and have it available within a simple chat command is really powerful.”