Join NTC for Networking Field Day 27!

Hello and Happy New Year everyone! Network to Code is very excited to start this new year presenting at Networking Field Day 27. Here is a list of our speakers and their topics:

John Anderson – Nautobot App Platform Overview

This session briefly covers Nautobot as a Source of Truth (SoT) and then moves on to cover, in depth

• Nautobot as an App Platform
• Why the concept of a platform is important
• Open source Nautobot apps currently available

Tim Fiola – Automating Circuit Maintenances

Managing circuit maintenances and notifications is a well-known problem by network operators. Circuit maintenances are scheduled by Network Service Providers (NSPs) and temporarily affect the actual state of a circuit. There are steps that must be done to ensure network operators and automation tools know the state of a circuit that is ultimately dictated by an NSP.

This session explains how you can let Nautobot automatically take care of fetching notifications, normalizing their data (most common case is that every NSP has its own notification template), and finally updating the SoT to keep track of past, present, and future changes related to circuit maintenances.

Tim Schreyack – NetDevOps-Driven Configuration Compliance

Network Automation is a journey and there are still growing trends around NetDevOps and learning skills and tools such as JSON, YAML, Jinja2 templating, Python, and Ansible.

This session walks through how you can take a gradual path to learning and how you can apply those skills to achieve NetDevOps-Driven Configuration Compliance.

Tim Schreyack – Using ChatOps to Talk to Your Network

With network automation, you must consider how users will interact with the automation infrastructure. Who opens every network request you work on? How often are you fielding requests just to get data and relay it to another team? Wouldn’t it be great to have a bot respond to requests to bounce a port, check an interface’s VLANs, check a rack elevation diagram, view inventory, view dashboards in tools like Grafana, and a whole lot more?!

This session showcases network-centric ChatOps showcasing demos that combine Microsoft Teams, Webex Teams, Slack, and Mattermost chatting with Arista CloudVision, Cisco ACI, Cisco Meraki, Grafana, Nautobot, IP Fabric, Kentik, and Ansible, and more!

John Anderson – Synchronizing Data to Create a Single Source of Truth

It is extremely important that the Source of Truth (SoT) hold data on the intended state of the network. However, it is near impossible to store all authoritative data required to manage network configurations in any single application. This is why it is critical to have a framework that synchronizes data across multiple authoritative sources for different types of data into your SoT, including:

• IPAM/DDI platforms
• CMDBs
• Circuit databases
• Any other tool that is the authoritative source for a specific dataset

In this sense, the SoT acts as an aggregation layer across all your authoritative sources. This aggregation allows users to leverage existing tools while getting the data into a Single Source of Truth that then has a unified view into ALL data and can be used to power network automation.