Automation Excellence Webinar Series – Part 1: Empowering Network Teams

and hello good afternoon for everyone over there in UK EU just going to give it a minute here as we wait for folks to join into the room Welcome to our empowering networks uh operations teams webinar for today just wait about one minute as we wait for the room to fill up so just hang tight right great to see everybody joining in here for our UK EU Edition welcome uh we are going through our automation Excellence webinar Series this is part one empowering Network operations teams our agenda for today

uh we’ll go through some introductions uh then we’ll talk about Excellence through intent moving on to why the Legacy approach falls short uh then value of network source of Truth what does that mean and really what is a network source of TR then intent-based networks in action some practical applications of intent-based network networks and then some time for Q&A uh if you do have questions please do use the Q&A box down there in in your zoom bar that is the best way to get us questions that way

we can make sure we address it and get you an answer as well as share that question with the rest of the group so everyone can hear and get uh Insight from whatever you may be all wondering about but please do feel free to interact with us we’ love to get questions so it’s always good we will either answer them live during the webinar or at the end during the Q&A session so moving into introductions uh my name is Tim Schreyack I am the director of sales engineering here at Network to Code and happy to take you through the webinar today um and as a special bonus

uh as we are doing the UK EU Edition also happy to introduce our Enterprise sales director in EMA Ben why don’t you say hello hi everyone I hope you’re well and uh having a decent Sunshine out there in uh UK Europe thank you thanks Ben uh so and Ben will’ll be back with some questions as we go through as well uh so moving on to Excellence through intent uh data is the foundation of network Automation and that’s this first section here we’re going to go through which is what is the intended State what do we mean by that when we say the intended State

uh the intended state of a network defines how the network should operate and that definition is stored in our Network source of Truth so typical things that we might contain in that Network source of Truth are our Network policies uh rules and configuration that govern the behavior in management of network traffic uh our Telemetry and monitoring policies definitions used to configure monitoring Telemetry systems uh quality assurance requirements uh the testing requirements that we might have uh our security policies

uh the guidelines and rules that Define how our Network should be protected uh from unauthorized access tax data breaches Etc uh compliance standards business and government you know requirements that we are have to implement or adhere to uh ensuring that we meet our regulatory standards design standards performance requirements business intent all of these ideas that are expressed in how we actually form and operate our network are the things that we’re looking at and these are the ideas that we express into our Network source of Truth

The Struggle we have is defining and delivering that intent in the traditional world uh as as we see here you know you don’t have to adjust your screen uh that uh image is intentionally blurry because we’re expressing this idea that intended state in our traditional managed environments is often kind of unclear and ambiguous and what we really want to understand is you know some of the things that we have is like neglected documentation uh intent must be constantly reviewed and updated

uh it’s a reactive Focus that is the the pressures that we often are dealing with on our day-to-day basis end up meaning that we Seline our documentation or we just never get around to it um one of the ways I like to describe this as you know one of the things things that we know that Network Engineers love to do when they get up in the morning the very first thing they think about is is doing documentation and we know that’s not true right like that that’s not how it works

uh it’s usually the last thing ever we ever get to and the result of this is that we have a lack of clarity uh we have outdated information we have inaccessible information or just PL up straight up missing uh and so these are the challenges we face as we operate our environments in these traditional ways so intent-based operations resolve this problem uh as Engineers Drive change into the network the intent is what we update and change uh and that is what instantiates change in our environment

so here’s an example uh a request is received to update let’s say a monitoring policy uh the engineer updates the Telemetry monitoring policy in our source of Truth the source of truth then implements and enacts that change in the network so as we see we’re really Shifting the way the engineer does this work because in the traditional world what would normally happen is the engineer would receive this request they would log into the equipment and immediately and directly make that change

now there may be some business process along that path where maybe they went and opened a ticket to document this change or you know did some other types of of business process steps but there would be very little if any update into our source of Truth or intended States so what we’re seeing here is rather than having the engineer uh interact with with equipment directly instead the engineer interacts with our intended State our source of Truth and then automation delivers the rest from there

so this is really a shift in the way that we think about and manage our environments the result is that documentation is done as part of our process uh rather than something that needs to be done as an extra step so enforcing the end state of the network the intended state is can be used to automate uh any number uh of components or basically all of the components that we see in our traditional world uh so new device and uh rack site deployments for example uh our it management system configuration firewall policy device life cycle

uh all of the components that we’re using can be informed and driven from this intended state so as we look at a way that we make this practical uh this is something that Network to Code has done to bring to the community and to the industry is this idea of really instantiating a network source of Truth and that is uh in practice implemented via Nautobot which is an open source project sponsored by Network to Code at its core it is a source of Truth uh it’s a place where we can document

uh and express what an environment should look like typically containing things like our inventory management so our devices and locations our ipam our DC uh all of the components we use to manage and operate the environment so the the network components like vlans and asns um including up to how do I Implement my business logic that may be through Uh custom relationships or custom fields that you might Implement in the tool

so we can take the tool and actually really represent what you have in your environment that’s a key element of the of the uh project is that we want it to be flexible uh so that it adapts to you rather than you trying to adapt to the tool now on the other side or the extension of that is how do we then start to make that data useful and that is the automation platform component of Nautobot this is where we start to actually use the data we have in the source of Truth to drive automation to actually implement

this idea of intent-based networking a lot of this is implemented through Nautobot applications you can see some examples here things like our golden config app for example or our data validation app these are all apps that take the data make it useful and actually allow us to begin to move into this idea of using our source of Truth as a way that we drive in the environment and one of the things I like to think about as as we express this idea is this is allowing us to go from maintaining the letter of the law to actually implementing the spirit of the law

and what I mean by that is quite commonly as we think about our environments uh for example once a year we usually come into our audit season or maybe several times a year depending on how many audits you are subject to in your EnV environment and we usually try to maintain our compliance such that we pass our audit essentially we’re trying to hit the letter of the law just let’s let’s make sure we can get through our audits make sure we don’t have any findings that we have to go remediate

that’s not really the intent of compliance the spirit of compliance is we want to operate good clean secure networks that deliver the services they should and protect us from outside attack and keep our Network up and running 100% of the time is our objective that’s the spirit of the law and as we start to use intent-based networking and a tool like Nautobot we can actually follow through on that ideal of hitting the spirit of the law rather than just maintaining compliance to the letter of the law

and that’s really a key element here is that we can truly level up the way we operate our environment by using a tool like Nautobot now why does the Legacy approach fall short uh this is a really risky way to manage our networks and these are things that we have dealt with over time as our networks have grown first we have this the high cost of network management inertia essentially there is actually a cost to doing nothing and why does it matter that we should start to modernize and think about how we operate our networks

so we have kind four major pillars here under this idea of doing nothing actually has a cost to it uh first it’s difficult to scale uh we have trouble scaling productivity uh it means we have to increase our headcount in order to try to keep up and therefore our cost never decreases for activity right like it’s it’s just only ever going to increase we end up with uh unexpected and excessive downtime uh either poorly planned and maintained network uh maintenances

uh sometimes we have issues where there is uh you downtime due to uh that’s impacting our business reputation in fact um atlassian estimated that there’s an average cost of downtime of about $7,400 per minute uh occurring in our environments uh across the industry every time we take you know an environment fails uh we have delayed business initiatives uh our projects take longer than they are expected to leading to delays or just failures of the project inevitable inevitably

uh we incur technical debt and this this is something that’s been happening for decades in our networks uh we keep kicking the can down the road and thinking we will deal with that someday into the future uh we end up with excessively complex networks because we have inconsistent design we have inconsistent configuration we have unaddressed vulnerabilities these all end up coming to impact us at some point and we just pray and hope that it doesn’t right but that is not a strategy how does the Legacy approach introduce risk

so not only is there a cost to it but there’s also risk uh almost all Enterprise networks adhering to Legacy practices exhibit at least some of these undesirable characteristics uh we have things like outdated operating systems um non-standard based configuration I look on one device and versus another where they should have virtually the same configuration and they don’t match uh we don’t know about the state of our support contracts uh we’re paying for equipment that we don’t need to have on our support contracts for example very common case

uh poorly configured security another really common one uh we had an application we Sunset it two years ago forgot to close the ports down on it uh now we have an open vulnerability into our Network into our environment uh think about your last major Network outage how quickly was your team able to determine the cost uh how quickly was the solution determined and how quickly did we implement it

and then afterwards did we do root cause analysis understand what happened document that and ensure that it won’t happen again it’s really hard to maintain that in a production environment particularly when you’re doing it uh at scale by hand and these are all ideals we’re after right like we want to be able to troubleshoot quickly get to that root cause and understand it and make sure it doesn’t happen again but the reality is when we manage our networks through the Legacy method it’s really hard to implement that now why are these so humberson

let’s take a look at that like each step requiring access to different systems and then hoping the information there is correct this is really common uh we often will have multiple sources of Truth in our environment depending on on what those sources may be um and quite often they will not agree so let’s go through a simple example uh an engineer gets a request uh but to complete it they have to spend quite a bit of time logging in and out of multiple systems

so the engineer receives the request and takes that from the itsm system and notes there some information from whoever requested it put it in the ticket for what they need to implement so the engineer starts to go gather information and this is very common they probably have to go look in multiple places they’re going to look in the cdb to check the device that it exists and where is it located uh going to look in uh in the DCIM tool to see like oh what’s the connectivity to that site

and then go check some information in ipam and then they may actually probably almost for sure log into the device itself to confirm that everything they just looked up is actually accurate because probably when they looked in one of those places the information was inconsistent and so they had to actually go out to the device to validate it was correct then finally after all of that Gathering the engineers be ready to begin some implementation

so now the engineers probably going to log again into multiple systems to begin the implementation phase then they start into the verification phase of going and checking did everything just go correctly and then finally we hope they get to the documentation phase but most likely reality sets in it’s the end of the day uh there’s another ticket to work on there’s an outage there’s another project they were trying to get done that’s got a deadline and they never quite get down to step five

and do the documentation like they were supposed to this is just the reality of what happens in the real world and we spend so much time collecting data context switching it it’s not surprising that it takes a really long time to get a simple task done and this happens dozens of times a day for every single person operating in the environment right this is just typical what we see in most Legacy environments and these challenges are just compounding they’re not going to get better

uh we have this graph here we see this General Trend uh where beginning way back in the 90s you know we had millions of devices and we are headed towards billions of devices right now we’re just kind of above a billion but this trajectory is growing at a crazy rate and we expect to see just this exponential growth within our environment within our networks and the amount of devices that we are expected to maintain to and that we have to operate on comp

on top of that we have a CH challenge of just hiring more people not only is that a challenge in and of itself we also have this problem where there just aren’t enough people entering our space the workforce is not increasing at the rate that it would need to if we continue to operate our environments the way we do as you can see here some examples from the US Bureau of Labor uh where the growth of the workforce is not matching the growth of the devices were expected to manage

on top of that new technologies constantly coming you know some examples here you know we started off with routers and switches we added in a voice over IP then Wi-Fi and now we have additional complexities uh sdn uh virtual networking uh as we move into cloud and hybrid Cloud uh and there’s just yet more coming right this is not going to decrease this is only going to increase so after those challenges what can we do this is the value of a network source of Truth it is the most essential component of intent-based networking

it is the foundation you cannot do uh infrastructure as code or intent-based networking or net devops however you want to phrase it without an accurate Network source of Truth this is where Nautobot comes in uh unlocking cost efficiency with Nautobot’s intent based approach right uh it allows you to optimize your resource allocation minimizing downtime we’re going to centralize data uh we’re going to streamline the data management process we facilitate workflow Automation and we streamline automation development these are key elements of what Nautobot brings to the table

and what it enables your teams to do we can also use Nautobot to mitigate Network risks uh it allows us to standardize and automate therefore eliminating human error and providing better oversight we have increased reliability uh reliable and predict networks because we have defined our standards and we’re able to enforce those standards we can avoid outages caused by misconfigurations uh compliance is maintained through regularly checking and ensuring the devices are configured as expected

we enhance our security posture we can eliminate human error and prevent new vulnerabilities with programmatic task execution we can address vulnerabilities uh because we’re able to go out and do things like automated operating system upgrades to patch our equipment at a rapid rate uh we can apply configuration patches as well depending on what the cause of that vulnerability may be uh we have increased visibility because we have defined that intent we can simplify the con consumption of that information

and allow the humans to make decisions more easily by just looking in one central place uh we can then therefore eliminate a lot of that human error that happens because we have to go look at multiple sources all of this leading to enhanced disaster preparedness uh configurations and topologies can easily be recreated from that source of Truth in the event of a disaster or the need to move to our Dr site we can also uh get benefit from being able to perform vendor neutral uh equipment swaps

uh so perhaps you know we’re currently using uh vendor a and we want to switch to vendor B uh we get a better uh discount or what have you from a different vendor uh we can do that more easily because we understand how our network is configured in a vendor neutral fashion uh just an interesting quote here from Gartner uh 80% of outages impacting Mission critical services will be caused by people and process issues and more than 50% of those will be caused by change configuration release intend integration and handoff issues

so we have a significant impact coming from the way that we manage our networks in Legacy fashion and this can be addressed as we move to intent-based networking Nautobot also provides us holistic perspective into our environment this is something we alluded to on one of those earlier slides where we have uh all of these different sources of Truth so whether it’s our cmdb or our DCM ipen you know traditional sources of truth but then other things that have now become sources of Truth things like ACI or our Cloud controllers that we start to treat

as sources of Truth and in the traditional World we’re asking the engineer to swivel chair uh between all of those different sources and make sure they’re all accurate which they probably aren’t so what we’re doing with Nautobot is bringing all of that information into one centralized location it essentially becomes our our data Clearing House where we can normalize that data we can enrich it we can synchronize it across our environment so we can make sure that all of our sources of Truth are accurate up to-date

and in sync with each other and this is one of the great advantages Nautobot brings to us you can also see this example here on the screen where we can see all of this data in one place uh you can see that represented by those colored boxes around each of the different components of data uh so referencing whether it’s from the device or from our DM tool or our cmdb tool all of that data presented in one holistic screen for the human to consume now down to Nautobot addressing Decades of accumulated technical debt

uh we also referenced this on a earlier screen this idea of this technical debt that we have acquired over the last 30 years that we’ve been operating Network uh we have our Legacy systems that we have just grown up with uh and those have incurred uh various bits of technical data as well we acquire new companies we merge with others and all of a sudden we have all of these networks that are really difficult to maintain just because their legacy along the way we implemented temporary fixes that became permanent this always happens we always promise ourselves

next year next month whatever it is we’re going to go fix this and we never just really have the time therefore leading to documentation gaps that just inevitably happen in our environment and we have this impact of increased cost reduced efficiency uh Innovation roadblocks what Nautobot allows us to do is to begin to address this problem in a consumable way we can begin to take this bit by bit and solve these challenges as we move from our traditional method to our intent-based networking

and that is really one of the core elements of Nautobot is to take a practical approach to this idea we understand you cannot just turn your network off and go rebuild it so what we need to be able to do is essentially rebuild the plane while we’re flying it and that’s exactly what Nautobot enables us to do Nautobot is at the core of automated operations where’re and we’re using data to drive that automation that is empowered large by the application ecosystem

uh that we referenced earlier as well and we’re able to not only take advantage of the apps that are available as part of the open source project we can also Implement custom or extensions as needed into an environment and that can be done uh either directly by your team uh or through an engagement with Network to Code where we understand you are going to have unique business process in your world and we need to be able to address that so we can simplify your workflows view via using Nautobot applications

Nautobot jobs in which we can do things like let’s say configure a V and create a simple repeatable process for your operations teams to follow so let’s take a look at some examples of intent-based networks in action uh we’re going to look at three here and we’ll go through those these particular use cases that we have actually done with our clients so this one is a pretty large convenience store chain and over 900 locations and they had a challenge with how do they refresh their Hardware

uh a lot of this had to do with the upgrade of the of the operating systems as well as the hardware itself perhaps planning for end of sale end of life equipment and before that they were spending around 3,600 hours per uh instance of needing to do upgrades and through the automation we were able to significantly reduce that down to around 225 hours so drastic change in the amount of time required in order to implement uh this kind of upgrade in their environment

what was this comprised of uh Nautobot as the network source of Truth and then those applications where we are able to automate task execution data collection and validation benefits coming out of this uh we have predictable workflow execution uh the each individual upgrade follows the same process every single time and tasks are completed with very few if any errors because we’re making sure we’re doing pre and post checks so we’re catching those things as it happens and making sure we deal with those problems that may occur during the upgrade process

because this is also happening in an automated fashion we’re able to and it has reduced its complexity we’re not able to use uh non-technical Personnel to actually Implement these upgrades so now Engineers are freed up to focus on other tasks uh this idea of we need to be able to handle more with the same amount of people that we already have so let’s find a ways that we can use automation to delegate the what is currently a very high level task down to lower level or non-technical individuals here’s another example uh a major Bank

uh accelerating time to Value uh automations streamline tedious Legacy practices so here in this case uh Nautobot was introduced as the network source of Truth and became the single source of Truth in the environment that is we leveraged the single source of Truth application from Nautobot to collect and distribute data across their various existing sources um so that’s dsim ipam their monitoring platform all of their existing sources of Truth centralized via Nautobot what the benefits we see from this right

now we have one place we can go to find information no matter who the team is uh individuals no longer have to log into multiple systems to discover the information they need in order to get their task or their job done uh and automations are the same right automations only have a single API to go request information from so now complexity of developing internal applications is drastically simplified the source of Truth also gives you the capability to enrich and standardize this data that we’re bringing in and Central and synchronizing across the environment

so as data enters Nautobot it is validated and normalized so we’re making sure that naming conventions are are consistent for example uh we can ensure that all of our components and all of the data looks the same everywhere data is then automatically converted into this standardized format as we store it into the source of Truth therefore as we synchronize that data back out now we have this standardized environment as well we’re now able to also take advantage of understanding what really exists in the environment

one of the great uh benefits they saw uh was this ability to forecast their device life cycles they were able to see across over hundreds of thousands of devices that they had in their environment the uh when do I need to refresh things so this is a very large scale environment so managing that was difficult for them uh now we take a big benefit here we’re able to forecast so we can look at in budgeting for next year and the year after what we expect to have to do for our end of support end of life devices

this also means we spend less time collecting that information we don’t have to send folks to go do that by hand we can do it through the automation understand that report on it and take benefit from being able to simplify our world here’s uh our last example coming from the US Department of Defense Joint Communications unit uh using Nautobot to streamline their site deployments so it’s really interesting use case uh talk that was presented at a conference

uh where we’re able to use Nautobot at its core to drive this type of deployment again using Nautobot as that source of Truth using automation from Nautobot to create site topologies uh Express what intended sites should look like through uh design accommodations within Nautobot and then have a capability for users or customers to uh access a self-service portal in which they can then deploy these types of sites uh prior to this uh the creating topologies and deploying sites very manual

uh automation really drastically reduced both the expression of this intent and then the rendering of that configuration for these sites and then deployment of that information in this particular example uh they were also leveraging Ansible awx uh the orchestration platform uh that is the open- source version of Ansible automation platform uh and we’re able to simplify the use of that tool that tool typically needs its own inventory right so now instead of having to manually update that automation tool we’re able to render that from Nautobot directly

uh so again simplifying the platform making sure we have consistent data across the environment uh and then these standardized device configurations enable the jcu to quickly perform device type life cycle changes as well with Nautobot jobs so not only the benefit of deployment but also those day uh two operations those changes that are occurring now also simplified as well so much major benefit as we look across this type of implementation of intent-based networking and three examples there for you from Real World projects that we have seen with our clients

so let’s take a look at some practical applications of intent-based networking essentially a better approach to managing our networks what are some of those benefits uh example one uh reduced Opex finding unused circuits within Nautobot uh this is a common case we’ve seen we’ve done this for a few of our clients where they have a large number of circuits and it is inevitable when you manage a lot of circuits that there are probably some that should have been turned off or disconnected that or not uh by using a tool like Nautobot

we’re we’re able to now inventory the circuits we have through automation we can go discover those circuits that exist on all of our routers and switches we can bring those into to the source of Truth and then we can generate a report that is comparing what we have in the database of Nautobot up against what we’re getting from our vendors then we can understand ah here’s a bunch of circuits that we don’t need anymore we can go ahead and retire we can look for those ones that are just not in use but we can also do things like we can look for underutilized circuits

uh we can take a look and pull in data from bandwidth consumption from our monitoring tool and understand like oh this circuit actually could be Consolidated with another because it’s it’s barely being used for example or perhaps we want to switch it from uh a more expensive type circuit to to a less expensive type uh we’re able to understand that and see that information report that information back based on the data that we have at the source of Truth we’re able to fulfill customer requests more quickly

uh as we look at the existing way we do this right um we went through some examples of this earlier but let’s take a little more detail on that so here in our existing Work Management uh each transition in task Waits upon the next individual to act and this accumulation of delay is measured across the entire process so the customer or the user submits an order request for something an engineer reviews that request and and sends out emails for approval uh we then wait for our approval review our risk management or or maybe our change board

uh we finally uh end up in front of the uh in infosec approval review uh perhaps there was some issue with the request uh we then finally move into performing that change and and then QA testing and then close out the ticket and as we move through that process there’s a large number of human interaction potential for human error uh tickets are updated by hand which means it’s unpredictable uh quite often that means we don’t always update it exactly as we should have so we have an unreliable historical record due to all of those additional manual oversights

uh that may trigger the process to start over we have additional cost and delay rather than being able to handle our standard changes through automation where we know that the change is going to operate consistently so as we look at modern Network management uh we follow the same business process that is we make sure that we do all of the tasks that we required to by the business or our our compliance but we do it in a much more efficient way so now the customer submits the order

uh we can qualify the request on submission through the automation we can potentially provide a pre-approval where we understand this type of request follows within our whitelisted change and therefore we said we don’t need to go get individual approvals this has already been pre-approved we can move right on through the process we can ensure that it’s going to be compliant with all of our standards uh we can perform the implementation and the testing after the implementation to to actually verify the change went correctly

uh and then close out the ticket and notify the user that their change has been implemented and we can go from taking days to implement requests to minutes uh where a user can get the thing they need uh and carry on with operating the business uh as quickly and efficiently as possible we can reduce our risks by ensuring every device configuration meets our standards so let’s talk through this a bit we alluded to it earlier but let’s actually talk through this use case of using Nautobot as a way to implement our configuration compliance

uh configurations are monitored to verify their compliance via Nautobot so we express what the configuration should look like in the source of Truth and then we use the Nautobot automation uh platform to then go verify is the device actually matching our intended state if it’s not uh our administrators our operators can be notified automatically that there is a problem that somehow a device has deviated from the expected standard and now we can go remediate that either by hand or even potentially through automation if desired

now when we first look at this this uh particularly for Network Engineers can be somewhat of a scary thing we think we do not want uh automation going and making changes automatically to our equipment we’re afraid of that but if you take a minute and a step back our uh companions over on the assist Administration side or the storage Administration side they have been doing this for decades now where their configuration of their devices is handled purely through Automation

and in fact if you log into a system in your environment almost for sure and you look in a configuration file it is going to say at the top of that configuration file if you make a change here it is going to be overwritten by the automation now if they were able to do it so can we now our challenges are greater we have more data to manage uh our environments are more complex uh in the hardware that we manage and operate but that doesn’t mean we can’t reach this goal

and this is how we move from this idea of just implementing the letter of the law to actually being able to operate at the Spirit of the law that is we want to have less frequent outages shorter outages less time spent troubleshooting a more secure network that is never going to happen if we don’t change the way we operate our Network Works uh continuing the behavior that we currently do and expecting different results is not going to happen right we need to change how we operate and manage our environments and this is the way this has already been proven out in other uh silos within our Tech stack

and we are simply taking those ideas and making them possible in a network environment and that’s what a network source of Truth is all about uh streamlining our operating system upgrades here’s a great practical example of uh something that is a common challenge something that is really difficult especially in a multivendor environment uh as we look at this you know it may be that we have a tool from a particular vendor that enables us to automate our OS our operating systems upgrades

uh but as we operate in a multivendor environment as our devices increase this becomes harder and harder and this is a major advantage of Nautobot where we’re able to implement our OS upgrades in a vendor neutral way so it doesn’t matter if it’s Cisco Arista Juniper F5 name the Tool uh or the the vendor we’re able to manage all of those upgrades from one centralized tool we’re able to express what are our upgrade requirements what are our pre-change quality assurance tests

what is our business process for the way we do upgrades and then what do we want to confirm after that change you know what is our business what is our unique environment in our Tech stack um making sure we document that change and then update all the appropriate Management Systems as a result of that um this is what the Nautobot OS upgrade application enables us to do enables us to say hey rather than we hear there’s a vulnerability from the security team and we need to go patch several thousand devices or whatever the case may be

uh and we think H this is going to take us at least a quarter to do maybe more uh in the traditional world now this is something we can plan for and Implement in a much shorter period of time perhaps a month or even less um that we might be able to Implement and scale now our environment and our management of that environment all right so that is bringing us to the conclusion of our prepared talks here so let’s start taking a look at uh any questions that you may have entered as uh we’re chatting away here throughout this presentation

and then I know that Ben had a really interesting case that came up with one of his clients uh the other day that we also kind of wanted to talk through with you all and look at what that sort of uh question may have been and and then kind of discuss the answer there so Ben uh let’s go ahead with that first one that you had from your client absolutely so the the question was that intent-based Journey you mentioned during the presentation sounds interesting granted I’ve seen the presentation before sorry

but what kind of wins can we realistically expect in the first few months after adopting Nautobot so what what they’re really asking to me is are there some quick wins that they can grab a hold of and then demonstrate value right yeah this is a common question that we get which is how how do I know that going through this process I’m going to show value back to the business that I’m going to get benefit from this what’s the ROI essentially is really what we’re asking

uh and the very first thing that we commonly see that really begins to benefit the teams is this idea of getting a centralized source of Truth and getting that data in so as we begin engagements with clients the very first thing we typically do is implementation of Nautobot and then ingestion of data into Nautobot and during that process we are both getting a consistent environment understanding what exists out there as well as normalizing all of that data

so we’re getting good clean data into the source of truth but we don’t want to stop there uh because it is hard to prove real value real uh Roi back to the business just from getting a good clean source of Truth we want to actually start to use that source of Truth and there Beyond just the requirement for hey we want to show value there’s also the how are we going to make sure we keep that data clean and accurate

uh and the best way to do that is to get Engineers on board with this idea that data is not just about documentation dat is about how we actually drive change and so from there the most common tool that we see folks implementing uh beyond that in that first step is the Nautobot golden configuration app that is Nautobot Method by which you can enforce config compliance this allows us to begin this journey to understand where are the deviations in the network and how do we get good consistent configuration in the environment so

first we get good clean data into the source of Truth and then we begin to use that data to inform our intent and get the in the network actually clean and consistent and that’s where we start to see real value back to the business suddenly we’re able to implement change more quickly because the environment is consistent uh we’re also able to discover things that we no longer need to say go purchase for example uh we had a client where they discovered through the use of the golden config app

and Nautobot as a source of truth that they had thousands of transceivers and closets they weren’t aware of that they didn’t suddenly didn’t need to go buy uh and it freed up a bunch of uh money in their budget uh so really great example cing coming in there as well so this is the value we see in those first initial stages as we start to use Nautobot as our source of Truth uh we got a question in from the audience here as well so let’s see uh for does Nautobot allow integration to open source AI tools

uh maybe human language interaction we possible to query Nautobot instead of traditional way of clicking through the page on the on the UI great question uh this is coming up continually uh as we move into Ai and large language models uh the short answer is yes I will give you a little explanation there as to what we mean by that so all of the data that we have in Nautobot um is accessible via the UI of course that’s for human consumption uh but it’s also accessible via our rest API

um that’s where we can get you know individual pieces of information back but we also have a graphql endpoint and that is how we’re able to get data in and out of Nautobot quite easily now we have created uh Integrations uh to with uh several uh language models uh I know off top of my head of big Panda and moft that we have used um but those are definitely not limitations it’s absolutely possible to use uh Ai and language models in order to quy Nautobot find information and be able to consume that information in a more friendly human readable fashion

so absolutely this is something we are uh very much working on as well internally uh and we hope to be able to release some exciting new features uh here coming up shortly as we move forward into a world where we are integrating AI into all the tools that we’re consuming and using so thanks for that question there uh let’s see Ben did we get any other questions in while I was answering that one did so it’s funny you should ask that Tim

so our team’s docu documentation might not be perfect you know not everything is programmer friendly is that a common hurdle when getting started with root are there ways to work around it or get the documentation up to speed in parallel with you using the tool right so how do I how do I get uh first of all that data ingested how do I understand what my environment looks like how do I begin to express that intent uh we take two different abstraction levels here as it comes to data and then intent

uh the first is the data itself of course how do I ingest that now commonly what we’re seeing and what we’re using is the device on boarding tool that is part of the Nautobot application ecosystem to be able to go scan our environment discover all the data that exists out there so we don’t need to do that by hand uh we definitely don’t want to be entering data into Nautobot by hand that’s not a good practice uh so we have that step now from there is how do we express intent

uh as we move in especially in in a multivendor strategy or or even within a single vendor perhaps you have different flavors of operating system uh like from Cisco for example maybe you have nxs and iOS and iox and XR Etc uh how do I manage all of that and that is handled through a temp ization so that we can express what our intent for the network is in a vendor neutral fashion uh it doesn’t matter whether it’s Cisco n xos or Arista or Juniper or even iOS right we Express in a vendor neutral fashion and then we’re able to interpolate that into the vendor syntax required

uh so this is how we deal with this problem of ingesting data making sure we can get started somewhere uh and this is one of the major benefits of uh engagement with uh Network to Code is that we’re able to accelerate this journey for you we had that Force multiplier that were able to get you moving more quickly to show value both to the business and the technical team because if we take too long uh we’re we’re just never really going to get there

uh on that Journey because there is not value coming back quickly enough I think looks like we also have another question coming in here uh is it possible to have a test account ah great question so uh Nautobot is available uh as free and open source you could download it to today and try it out uh there is a Helm chart if you wanted to try it out in a Docker on your laptop uh or uh you can spin up a VM but even better than that Nautobot is available in the Nautobot cloud

uh so you don’t have to go do anything other than get an account from Network to Code uh so absolutely we can definitely get you a test account to try it out in Nautobot Cloud you will just need to reach out to us through our sales team coming up here at the end we’ll have a few slides you’ll be able to reach out to Ben and get that arranged we’ll get you his contact information so don’t worry so yes is the short answer you can absolutely get a test account try it out

okay looks like I think that is probably I think that looks like all the questions we had coming in thank you everyone for the questions you’ve been asking and uh following through on those always great to hear interaction back from the group uh let’s just move on as we move into the conclusion of the webinar here uh a few things um we do have training available this is a common question we get as well which is how do I level up my team to be able to transition from this traditional world into intent-based networking

one of the major aspects of our business Beyond helping clients move more quickly is training your teams uh we have a combination of instructor-led training along with online training available the best world is the hybrid of those two things where they uh teams are able to go into a boot camp uh spend a day or a few days in a class really get practical Hands-On information from a trainer uh do go through those uh Labs as well where they have live feedback from their uh instructor

um but then follow that up with that online training so as they have questions as they move through their work life they can go and reference that information back they can continue to practice and actually implement this work in their uh day-to-day life uh as you see across the uh training Spectrum there we starting off from just getting started all the way up through very Advanced topics such as Telemetry monitoring and analytics uh so lots of opportunity here to learn and really level up your team as we looked at what we talked about today

uh today we learned how intent-based networking and Nautobot delivers outstanding outcomes that make your organization more productive and reduce operational risk along with a few real world examples and practical examples of intent-based networking in action uh we talked about achieving Excellence with intent based networking uh Legacy approach shortcomings uh some practical applications and the outcomes that a network source of Truth delivers

we also uh just recently released a network automation maturity assessment if you’re wondering hey where am I compared to where I want to be um this uh is it not too many questions it’s about 30 35 questions takes about 10 minutes to complete and what it’s going to do is help you understand where you are uh identify where you want to go uh and then give you some Elemental ideas of how you can proceed from the current state to the Future State

uh it’s a very great uh automated report that will be generated for you but specific to your environment based on the answers that you provide um and is a great way to begin to understand how you can proceed from where you are and where you might like to go thank you all for attending uh here are a few links to everything all Nautobot related great QR code there for you to get uh some basic information as well as Ben’s contact info please do reach out to him uh if you’d like to set up a demo uh have a one-on-one conversation with us uh or get access to Nautobot Cloud so you can try it out thanks everyone and look forward to seeing you on the next webinar