Why Maintaining Configuration Compliance Is Critical for Network Stability

All too often configuration anomalies go undetected until they cause a failure–with significant impact.

Another common issue?

Unauthorized network changes often go unnoticed for months or years, especially when NOC personnel deviate from established configuration standards for the sake of business continuity or change requests are improperly implemented.

While most organizations aim to maintain compliance with configuration standards, achieving a high level of adherence through manual methods is often unattainable. This is because, in order to achieve rigorous conformity, dozens of engineers would need to be dedicated to manually reviewing network configurations. However, this approach is usually impractical due to its high costs and limited effectiveness.

But there is a better way to maintain and manage networks in 2023.

That’s where NetDevOps-enabled configuration management and more specifically, configuration compliance comes in.

Configuration Compliance: The Basics

Configuration compliance guarantees that network devices are configured to established standards, thus improving the reliability, predictability and security of a network. For example, interfaces that are configured and maintained to a standard are less likely to exhibit unexpected behaviors and are easier to troubleshoot.

This is accomplished by defining configuration standards and then auditing the network for deviations from those standards. The standards are defined through a combination of configuration models and data. Understanding the factors that cause variances in those standards, such as the role of a device or its location, are important. Fortunately, Nautobot excels in this capacity, allowing for dynamic standards that are automatically generated. Deviations from a standard are measured by comparing the standard against actual device configurations.

When discrepancies are found, they’re brought to the attention of network administrators. They can then decide whether it’s appropriate to realign the configuration with the standard. In some instances, as in the case of a break-fix, it may be desirable to keep a non-standard configuration in place temporarily. While the temporary solution is in place, a proper solution ensures that administrators are aware of the deviation. Once a permanent solution has been discovered, the standard can be updated to reflect the change.

In order to fully embrace proper configuration compliance, automation and a source of truth are essential.

The Power of Configuration Compliance

Would you like to achieve a stable and highly predictable network? Data-driven configuration compliance makes this coveted state obtainable.

Fewer incidents mean that networks are less noisy and fewer resources are dedicated to remediating those incidents. When incidents do occur, administrators are troubleshooting familiar configurations, expediting resolution times. End users enjoy an enhanced experience because interruptions are less frequent and shorter in duration.

The governance and implementation of changes also become much easier. Network administrators can be confident the pre-change state of the network is predictably configured. Change managers benefit because projects are completed on schedule without implementation disruptions. NOC Managers can rest easy knowing that both the intended state and actual state of the network are backed up in a version-controlled repository.

Reducing the complexity of network configurations enhances monitoring operations. Administrators simply contend a familiar solution as opposed to numerous one-offs, so less time is spent addressing unique implementations. This reduces the effort to set up and maintain alerts, so your team can focus on optimizing monitoring performance.

Transitions to new device models and vendors are streamlined. Because configurations are an output of intent, one merely updates Nautobot to reflect the hardware change. This causes a new intended configuration to be generated which reflects the change in hardware.

By making networks more reliable with configuration compliance, enterprises are able to deliver the resiliency that core business operations require.

The Network to Code & Nautobot Difference

In order to help organizations navigate configuration management challenges with a renewed clarity that invites reliability, resiliency, and security, Network to Code has developed a number of solutions powered by Nautobot to ensure networks operate in a highly predictable, scalable, and reliable manner, including:

• Source of Truth Aggregation
• Configuration Backups
• Intended Configuration Generation
• Configuration Compliance

Source of Truth Aggregation

With Nautobot Single Source of Truth, your organization can aggregate and source authoritative data from multiple internal systems, including ServiceNow, Infoblox, and Nautobot, into a single location. This approach provides a single repository of standardized up-to-date and accessible data, which can then be leveraged to build configurations.

Configuration Backups

Version-controlled backup configurations are critical for organizations when sites go down, data is lost or connectivity is upended. With Network to Code’s free and open source Golden Configuration app, there’s instant access to a Git repository with configuration backups.

With this information, it’s simple to compare the rendered configuration with the backup configuration to determine compliance, by leveraging an existing solution (Rancid, Ansible, Oxidized, etc) or the Nautobot platform.

Intended Configuration Generation

Nautobot generates intended configurations by leveraging Jinja templates and data aggregated and stored in Nautobot. Then Nautobot stores the intended configurations in a Git repository, which makes tracking changes to the intended configuration easy.

Configuration Compliance

Lastly, the Nautobot Golden Config App can schedule comparisons of the current network configuration to an intended state configuration. By alerting administrators to deviations and errors, a lack of compliance can easily be spotted—and fixed. Even better? Single-touch or zero-touch resolutions are possible.

It’s time to mitigate the unnecessary network outages and deviations that lead to revenue loss.

Get Started with Configuration Compliance

Ready to streamline your approach to configuration management with a NetDevOps-first mindset?