Network Configuration Management with Nautobot Golden Config

Effective configuration management is the backbone of a well-maintained network, but it’s a daunting task given the complexity of today’s networks.

Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just getting started, Nautobot’s Golden Config app can help you streamline your network configuration management and remediation. In this article, you’ll learn how to use Nautobot to plan, deploy, and remediate your network device configurations so you can take control of your network.

What Is Network Configuration Management?

Network configuration management is the process of planning, deploying, and maintaining changes to network devices to promote reliability, security, and scalability. It helps organizations improve their network security and reduce the risk of outages.

Why Is Configuration Management Important in Networking?

Configuration management is important in networking because it enables organizations to identify and fix misconfigurations that could lead to outages or security breaches, configure networks more efficiently while reducing the risk of human error, and maintain accurate records of configurations for compliance purposes.

Nautobot Golden Config Features

Nautobot is the leading open source network source of truth and automation platform. Its Golden Config app was originally designed to perform basic analysis and reporting on your intended state and actual state configurations by:

  1. logging into devices, collecting their configuration backups, and saving them to version control;
  2. querying source of truth data from Nautobot and saving it to version control; and
  3. comparing the two and generating reports.

A three-step process that gave administrators absolute confidence that their network was configured exactly as it should be, a critical goal in achieving Intent Based Networking (IBN).

New features in Golden Config take these network configuration management capabilities to the next level. We’ve broken them down into three main elements: remediation, configuration plans, and the actual deployment of those configuration plans.

Configuration Remediation

Remediation is the process of taking the backup and intended configuration of a device, as we just mentioned, then figuring out what’s missing from the intended state and coming up with a plan to get that device into compliance. Nautobot now intelligently identifies these discrepancies between intended and actual network configurations, making it a breeze to stay compliant.

By default, Nautobot accomplishes this by using hier_config, an open source repository that consumes the running configuration of a device, compares it to its intended configuration, and builds the remediation steps to bring it into compliance. But it’s also flexible enough to meet any custom business requirements; you can use Python to tell Nautobot about your own business requirements and how you want to remediate certain configurations.

Golden Config now gives you the ability to enable or disable remediation on a per-compliance-rule basis as well, because there might be certain configurations that you do not want to remediate for whatever reason.

Additionally, Nautobot’s content-aware compliance diff feature helps you spot missing or extra configurations — even on diverse device types such as routers, switches, and firewalls.

Configuration Plans

While it’s great to be able to press a button and deploy corrective actions, effective network configuration management needs to have review and approval processes to ensure the correct changes are made and done in the needed order and times. Because Golden Config generates each change as its own object, the objects can be reviewed and scheduled independently. This allows configuration plans to be used to schedule deployments at the most appropriate future times. Nautobot then enforces your internal approval steps and change control processes.

The app can also push out more than just remediation plans; it supports intended state and missing plans, so you can push configurations to support the rollout of new and replacement devices. Additionally, the app allows you to make manual changes on an ad hoc basis.

Configuration Deployment

As the name suggests, this feature allows you to deploy the configuration plans that you created in the previous step. And you have the flexibility to deploy one or many plans across one or many devices.

Configuration deployment follows a lot of the same concepts and frameworks that Golden Config as a whole does; it uses Nornir as a framework, which allows for easy adoption, usability, and flexibility. If your business requires very strict compliance to a certain configuration standard, for example, you can now create your own Nornir dispatcher for that through Golden Config.

Network Configuration Management and Remediation with Nautobot

Nautobot’s Configuration Remediation Engine takes your intended and actual configurations and tells you, for example, how to get rid of a specific command or how to use a specific operating system’s configuration replacement option. Not only does it know what’s extra and what’s missing, it uses that information to help you fix your configuration and, in turn, bring your device into compliance.

By providing intelligent configuration remediation, content-aware compliance diff, versatile device compatibility, and customization options, Golden Config empowers professionals to take control of their network configuration management, ensuring compliance, security, and operational efficiency.


Conclusion

Want to learn more and see it in action? Watch our webinar, “Unlocking Network Automation with Nautobot’s Golden Config App.”

-Chris M.


Tags :

ntc img
ntc img

Contact Us to Learn More

Share details about yourself & someone from our team will reach out to you ASAP!

Author