Automation Excellence Webinar Series – Part 3: Control

and welcome to those just joining into the webinar for today um it always takes about a minute for folks to get joined in so we’re just going to hang out here for one minute while we wait for the uh room to clear to fill up so just hang on tight for one second while we uh wait for everyone to get filtered in those just joining we are waiting about a minute while we wait for everyone to get joined into the room hang tight all right great to see everybody out there today wherever you are in the world welcome in this is our

uh part three of our automation Excellence webinar series taking control of your network Destiny our agenda for today we’ll go through some introductions um and then we’re going to talk about Network management costs um then move into the idea of intent based networking and how we can use that to reduce costs and capture new value um we’ll take a look at some different workflows uh you know manual versus intent based and kind of what is the difference between those and and advantages we see from intent-based networking I’ll give you some real world examples

um and then talk about how Network to Code here this is what we do and how we’re positioned to help you and your organization um and then of course time for Q&A if you do have any questions please do use the Q&A box um that’s the best way to get those questions to us make sure we can track them and answer them for you we will do our best to answer them live uh occasionally we may answer some just in the Q&A box but either way we’ll get you your answers there

so please do feel free to send those into us we love getting the questions from you all so that uh helps us know uh make sure that we’re targeting the information to you and what’s helpful for you uh so introductions my name is Tim Schreyack I’m the director of sales engineering here at Network to Code and I’ll be going through this webinar here with you today so as we look at the network management challenges kind of the inefficiencies that we have in our networks and in our environments that drive cost and impede progress

let’s look at some of those uh factors and what it actually is causing these challenges that we see uh so for example starting off with just our teams uh what types of tasks are Engineers performing uh they’re typically really occupied with things that can be automated uh so they often find themselves just doing repetitive tasks that are taking up a huge amount of their time uh whether it’s things like like processing change requests um for user provisioning and firewall updates

uh restoring Network functionality when an incident occurs perhaps U you know spending a long time doing OS upgrades right we we have a patch that comes out we need some compliance reason and we end up spending months or even uh you know longer to do that process um and then just regular maintenance activities um things that just really consume a lot of time and what ends up happening as you can see kind of in this visualization here is that we’re spending a tremendous amount of our time on repetitive engineering tasks and not much on our business initiatives on our strategic goals on the things that we’re really trying to do to drive the business forward

we’re just spending so much time just keeping the lights on uh versus actually driving the business forward uh then we have this unsustainable demand problem uh new technologies and exponential growth of our connected devices uh so as we look at this here you know we have these uh information coming to us from the very ious uh industry experts you know whether it’s Garner or otherwise and they’re giving us these predictions that we’re just seeing this exponential growth across our networks and the increase of trending of more and more devices being attached to the network

um and as we look at this you know this is just adding on not only the devices but also the technologies that we’re having to deal with and that means in the Legacy approach right we we solve this problem by by hiring more folks um which then uh hopes hopefully allows us to produce more work but ends up happening is that we’re not reducing cost we’re simply uh just barely keeping up as we move forward and this means that you know we end up having to increase our departmental budget as those Services increase and typically quality of service ends up decreasing

um as we go down this path right it just gets harder and harder to maintain all the things and do all the work uh and so we’re we’re trying to balance this problem of we have this growth but yet how do we deal with that an alternative to this is Network Automation and intent-based networking is the way that we suggest and propo this problem so but beyond that uh looking at uh you know our equipment our services and our software uh we are having additional costs

um the equipment right unnecessarily complex underutilized resources we have our collocation costs as those as those scale up uh Services um we end up with more thirdparty dispatches uh you know man service providers we’re having to rely more and more heavily on them to help us operate our environments uh we bring in uh you know outside contractors sometimes um and then on the software side right uh you know we’re locked in whener lock in between licensing and support and we are

uh having to deal with uh you know how do we track these licenses and and make sure we’re having compliance um so that in of itself adds more overhead as we are trying to deal with all of these additional complexities already operational waste right so here’s some some another example of ways that we have you know inefficiencies really bringing down our performance uh we have uh avoidable engineering efforts uh this is the idea that you know sometimes

uh a repetitive manual tasks um that could be performed via automation um is is a way that we can deal with one of these aspects uh we have uh data disorganization uh this is where we have data just across our different environments across different systems um essentially the environment and the process is unnecessarily complex uh so how can we simplify that uh there are issues where we have avoidable outages right that we have a poorly planned or just managed

uh network uh man maintenance issues where we’re we’re dealing with so much it is difficult to keep up um and our Personnel are overburdened uh workloads are exceeding their capacity to get the work done to diagnose accurately um typically they’re running from one complex issue to the next complex issue and not really ever having time to think to breathe to react to ensure that hey we are going to solve these problems in a way that means we don’t have to keep solving the problems over which is typically what’s happening in our environments right we’re just running from

one problem to the next with such speed that we never really have time to solve the problems um in a way that we could avoid them in the future so how do we help begin to work on this challenge uh intent-based networking uh this is a way in which we can begin to reduce our cost um and with a solution that helps us resolve these operational challenges what it means is to basically liberate our staff from those repetitive tasks that they do to maintain a network

so here you can see just this visualization of this idea let’s compress down all of those repetitive tasks they’re doing let’s have automation handle those things and allow the humans to focus on those strategic business initiatives that we’re really trying to accomplish in order to help Drive the business forward because at the end of the day that’s the reason our environments exist they exist to serve the purposes of the business not just to be there as

uh things that we’re doing repetitive tasks on right so this is how we’re really trying to focus this idea of getting into driving the business forward automations help us uh in this way because they allow us to scale better um they don’t make mistakes and they don’t mind performing the same task every day over and over and over again right they don’t get bored um and these are some of the advantages we see when we take repetitive tasks and we let automation handle that

um we know that we’re going to get consistent reliable outputs um Engineers humans we’re better suited at tasks that take advantage of our skill sets of you know whether it’s driving the business or innovating um and really helping us to focus on those tasks rather than those heavy repetitive ones um ultimately what we’re seeing is hey we don’t necessarily have to increase our head count to deal with more workload uh we’re more efficient we get more productivity

uh our in our engineers and our individuals are happier uh we drive down our costs and our quality of service goes up uh we can produce or eliminate engineering effort with service portals self-service portals here’s another great way uh the self-service idea that we can Empower our non-technical people to be able to implement their own requests without even realizing it um you know here’s a simple example right like a new needs to get a PC and a phone

uh you know rather than having a human go through a bunch of steps to do that test we can uh Drive the user or perhaps their manager to a self-service portal where they put in the appropriate information um and then we go out and configure all the appropriate components of the technology infrastructure stack to deliver those Services um so that is you know maybe configuring a network Port if we’re talking about someone in a branch office uh you know

uh spinning up maybe uh their remote access uh getting them the all the appropriate things they need in order to begin their job uh saving engineering hours faster times to delivery great great Advantage here where we can actually get these Services back to the user much more quickly uh and allowing the requestor to really Define what it is they need uh in a way that minimizes chances for miscommunication uh we know this happens regularly we send emails and oh there’s a miscommunication in there and then all of a sudden we’re doing the work

again because we didn’t understand the the ask the first time around and so we end up doing doing twice the work um simply because of miscommunication triggering automations to reduce engineering effort uh this is another great way where we have events occurring in our Network and we’re able to self-trigger those automations to negate the need for human effort or human intervention uh we can design our automations to respond to events like perhaps a circuit outage or interface flat or down devices

uh you know in example that we see here on the screen uh in automation is triggered because the monitoring system reports a circuit’s gone offline uh we execute a series of tasks which would normally be done by a human um and you know beyond just saving that a human effort uh uh automations of this kind can respond immediately to events whereas you know overloaded uh teams and humans uh often will take a minute right before they can get to that or they have to stop what they’re doing in order to do this thing

um whereas here we can rely on the automation to be able to basically to almost unlimited handle uh parallel tasks that are coming in you know and you can see here you know all of the steps that we might go through in an automation you know between checking for the flapping condition updating an internal ticket shutting down the primary circuit opening a ticket with the carrier you know all of these things that that would take a lot of time for us as a team and as humans to go through we can do execute in minutes through the automation

um and the best thing is um all the engineers that were busy doing uh you know business initiatives can continue doing that we can let the automation handle this work in the background uh reducing environment complexity uh this is a really interesting story uh which is how do we take a challenge take a look at the mess that we have been dealing with in traditional networking uh where we have our original design that we uh you know our Architects or our Network Engineers came up with and we said this is what things should look like and then inevitably what happens is

we have variant one and then variant 1.1 and variant 1.2 etc etc and we end up with all of these different variations on the network and this is just an inevitable process of the way what we manage uh between having multiple people managing the environment uh maybe the uh definitions are not clearly defined or not easily discovered uh we don’t have a consistent uniform strategy in which we take that original design and make sure that it maintains consistency over time

um this results in you know unpredictable Network Behavior Uh it’s harder to troubleshoot we have increased likelihood of network faults this happens all the time uh we like oh we happened to switch over to the secondary switch and it wasn’t quite in line with the primary switch and we have a problem as a result uh we have increased likelihood of security incidents as well right like this is where we have you know mistakes in ACLS or other security

uh efforts where all of a sudden now we have an issue because there wasn’t good consistency in the environment and then it continues from there uh this problem only grows um as it we add in more uh changes over time we have a new engineer comes in isn’t familiar with that standard and all of a sudden we have all of these different flavors and mess happening in our Network and it’s just constantly growing so what do we do we bring in this idea of using our intent-based networking our Network source of Truth and its capabil ities to help us take that current mess

we have clean it up and therefore drive this problem out of the network and drive consistency in so what we’re saying is hey we have our traditional networks they tend to be messy how do we fix them in a way that keeps the network operating and that’s where a tool like Nautobot comes into the mix it allows us to take advantage of the goldic application that is part of the Nautobot ecosystem to Define our environment to understand where those consist are and then to remediate them to get us to good clean consistent environment this ultimately leading us to more stability more reliability

and a more secure network taking a look at other advantages right uh we can reduce our software spend and our vendor lockin uh we can leverage open- Source Solutions uh to reduce our expenses and address Financial risks uh as we look at kind of the model that Network to Code uh promotes and enables uh using Nautobot and its companion applications uh we can see where we have going down this open source path we have you know there’s no licensing calls

um we enable the idea that there’s no vendor lock in it is a multivendor enabled environment um therefore leading to reduced support and maintenance costs uh especially you know when you think about this vendor lockin idea uh you know often you know a particular vendor will promote their tool and saying it’s amazing and often it is um but uh it means that you’re now locked into buying their equipment or their particular solution you don’t have the option to go to

another vendor um and this is one of those challenges as we look at these types of tools that they they often come with this vendor lockin problem and this is often leading us to problems down the road it will typically solve the problem in the short term but then ultimately limits our choice and makes things harder as we move forward and here you know just a clear-cut example of looking at you know one option here you know we say hey Ansible automation platform it is an amazing tool

um but it comes with licensing costs and it does enable a vendor lockin uh versus going the open source route using Nautobot uh Ansible awx uh and really getting that lower uh cost to barrier to entry that multivendor strategy and getting you a holistic uh view of support provided by Network to code in this case intent based networking uh capturing new value right right so how automations can pave the way for new services and faster time to Value

uh one of the advantages we see as we as we leverage and tape based networking is that we can recognize Revenue more quickly uh we can improve our cash flow by operationalizing new Services uh more efficiently getting them to Market in a better way so when we manually plan and and and deploy new Services I’m sure you know if you’ve led a team doing this it is a very long difficult process um usually measured in often weeks or months um and takes us quite some time to get to that operational State

uh whereas if we have automation that enables us to deploy and bring up new Services we can limit that deployment time and even that planning time to much shorter periods of time and get into that operationalized and revenue generating period of time much more quickly uh improving our customer service improving our cash flow improving our G business initiatives we can offer more services uh and new Services more efficiently more quickly uh we can deliver these Services

uh in a much better way you know as we look at across the human Le effort where uh a single team or group of teams is really trying to multitask and that’s going to limit what they can do um if we can leverage those automations uh to do those repetitive tasks or those basic tasks under the hood the team can uh spread a little bit more broadly and be able to drive more efforts simultaneously also can improve our scalability you know as we look across most business

um most of the time throughout the year the need for our technical Stacks tends to EB and Float there are periods where the business is more busy than other periods and it will depend on your specific type of business you know if you are a retail business probably you’re you know you’re busy as we lead up to the holiday season um you know other types of business will have different uh Cycles throughout the year and this requires us to add infrastructure or remove infrastructure as we as we go through the year versus

um say just building for that maximum all the time and this is where we can really leverage automation that we don’t necessarily have to have that full stack deployed all the time we can ramp the stack up and down as needed uh thereby uh minimizing the level of effort that our team needs to manage right like we just don’t have as much equipment when we don’t need it um and then bring it in as needed in order to deliver the services required as the business and flows throughout the year

now let’s kind of start to compare our workflows that is our manual efforts versus our intent-based efforts and what does that mean uh so kind of a closer look at our level of effort so here’s an example so you imagine that we are upgrading hundreds or or let’s say thousands of operating systems as many of our clients do using our tools uh this is a timec consuming manual process uh keeps multiple Engineers busy for usually months um because every night they can only tackle a set handful of devices just because there’s a large number of steps to be done

um and it’s really tedious manual effort so you kind of look there in the upper upper quadrant on the left there we can see you know just just you know estimates of how much time goes into doing just a handful of devices say it’s something like 20 devices versus as we move over to an automated world we can see a huge Improvement in amount of time required and this is because we can run these tasks in parallel uh we can run them in the background the automation is handling a lot of the busy work

uh so a single engineer can now manage the upgrades of hundreds of systems or even thousands of systems per night uh versus you know being limited to a much smaller subset uh we have seen uh up to 75% faster uh improve uh time Improvement in this type of effort as we’ve enabled our clients with these types of tools uh we also see reduced errors this is a huge problem when we do uh OS upgrades and in fact is one of the reasons why we typically do limit it

uh down to such small numbers is because we want to be really careful um it’s really easy to break the network when you’re going through this process um and by using automation we can minimize or even eliminate those types of Errors because the automation can be built as such to go do those checks um and make sure that we stop the process if there is a problem occurring anywhere along the path and you can kind of see how we’ve broken that down below there we have those pre

uh checks so those pre-upgrade tasks um we have the upgrade itself and then we’ve got the postupgrade checks you know during that pre pre-process we’re going through and and confirming the state of the network confirming the state of the device um making sure we’re getting snapshots that we have something to compare that to against afterwards so we can ensure the device actually came up as expected um during the upgrade itself there’s so many tedious things a human typically needs to do

um and you need to do everything in the right order you know you’re doing multiple devices at once you make an easy uh you know copy paste mistake and all of a sudden you’ve blown up a device and really caused an outage um simply because you’re just overloaded and busy with your work uh here we can rely on the automation to go through consistently every time through those steps another one uh Green Field deployments uh how do we you know really leverage automation here in this case

um you know if if you’ve gone through this type of process whether it’s a new data center or maybe even just a branch office you know that there’s a tremendous amount of effort that goes into planning out that doing the deployment and then going and verifying all as well you know especially when we’re in our data center environments we want to confirm that all of the cabling was done correctly and you know all of the components are up and running as expected this takes a tremendous amount of time

uh versus as again we can pre-plan these tasks out with automation and we can have all of these tasks again being happening in the background and in parallel with the efforts that humans are doing uh so things like you know uh our design uh documents that we need to create we need to go uh allocate IP spaces and vlans and then write the configuration for all these devices all of these things that we’re doing manually uh we can allow automation to do we can reduce that workload

uh and now we ensure that the the right equipment is selected um because the automation is going to check that uh we can push the configuration to the device using zero touch provisioning uh we can uh check out the functionality and ensure that it actually functions we can run tests against that equipment automated tests uh and then provision that Hardware into our it systems into our cmdb um so now we know it’s uh been properly configured properly deployed updated into the

uh tracking software and we’re ready to go we can move it out into the environment uh increasing efficiency again reducing our errors and really giving us consistency as we drive uh new environments as well okay now let’s take a minute to look at some real world examples these are some case studies uh from clients that we have done work with and we’ll talk through uh two specific use cases here uh one here was for a uh global banking uh very large company

uh that leverages Nautobot currently today to accelerate their time to Value uh the challenge they had was that they had a growing customer base and their customer expectations are increasing uh and their systems very Legacy very manual process causing a lot of delays uh and they just couldn’t keep up with command for services from their customers uh so as a solution uh we we implemented Nautobot as a central hub for their data and platform to automate tasks on

uh the result from this was uh a centralized data system and integration with their existing tools uh so that we have a seamless flow of data in the environment uh we’re able to reduce their deployment time uh through automation going from weeks to hours in deployment uh and we can get streamlined analytics and data back about what’s happening in the environment so we can make accurate real-time decisions about whether it’s purchases of new hardware or additional circuits or any of the cases that we’re always going into as far as planning for where

we are versus where we need to go with our network uh the result and also you know we saw a 35% reduction in their analytical process uh and going again from deployment from weeks to hours so really impressive amount of uh benefit that we had here at this particular Bank uh we just dropped the link for you if you’re interested to that particular case study you can read it here after the webinar if you want to see those further details about what happened in that particular case and and we have

another one here uh I can give you the name on this one this is Princeton University uh where they were able to deploy uh their Network equipment and devices uh but in 95% less time a remarkable Improvement uh that we had in this case uh again the challenge here uh they needed to do an upgrade across uh 26 buildings uh in their environment they were uh upgrading to Aruba switches and they needed to get this done as quickly as possible uh manual process very very slow is taking them over 40 hours per building

so basically over a week’s worth of effort per building uh so this you know multiply that out that’s 26 weeks half the year uh their engineering team simply not capable of getting that done in the time required uh so we were able to help them with an automated solution uh is integrated with service now so we have the self-service portal uh we’re able to gather data and uh disseminate what the uh routines and the automation should be and then use the

um Quality Assurance testing that we had as part of this process as well to ensure that it was correctly deployed after the after the fact uh leading to this overall 95% reduction in their efforts here and allowing them to actually get this Tas done in the time required uh which would not have been possible otherwise uh yeah so great use case great example here and again we did just drop that link for you as well if you’re interested in reading that after the webinar here today

okay so Network to Code how can we help we are positioned to do exactly that uh and we our job really is to ensure that you have a holistic approach to network automation one of the major advantages that you’ll find working with network to code is just this idea of expert guidance uh success really hinges on this idea of anticipating and understanding the understanding the challenges you’re going to face and really how can we leverage that in in the typical world when we go down this path there are going to be distractions there are going to be challenges

uh whether it’s anything along our path that’s a distraction to us um or gets in our way U and this is where going down this road on your own can really be difficult right we’re trying to get to this end goal of you know lowering Opera costs of in increasing our stability business agility Etc um but how do we get there and that’s where choosing the right partner can really make that difference help you avoid those challenges help you get to the goal in a direct line

um rather than having to go through all these deviations and hopefully maybe someday get there so y NTC uh our experience our team consists of we believe the most extensive group of network automation that exists Network automation experts sorry that EX exist globally uh we have the largest collection that we are aware of and we work with hundreds of very large- scale Enterprise clients uh we have a comprehensive approach uh we understand adopting automation is not just a technical challenge

uh this is really key uh our holistic approach focuses on not only the technology but also what are the business challenges what is the business process and how do we make sure that our people can participate in this process as well we need to link all of these things together in order to actually get to that goal which is we can Implement a great technical solution but if we don’t meet the business needs and if we don’t bring the people along then it will have failed and this is what we’re all about at Network to Code we want to link those three things that is the people the process

and the technology uh and velocity uh we act as a force multiplier uh we bring in a very specialized skill set that we can help your team move fast and at a vossy that would not be achievable without us in the mix so some resources that are available out there for you um Community is at the heart of what we do um so we are always sharing and publicizing we have our ebooks and our white papers uh we have webinars and videos like the one you’re watching today and of course the publishings of the books that we have as well

uh both uh our most recent book Network automation with Nautobot it’s proving to be really popular it’s a very practical book that can really leverage uh or help your team leverage tools like Nautobot and get up to speed on it in very practical examples given in the book that are applicable to real world challenges that you and your team are probably facing today okay we’ve got some time here for some Q&A for questions that you may be uh asking or firing away with me

uh so I see some actually came in during the webinar here so that’s great uh happy to go through these let’s see um how will you deal with service decommissioning do you need to prepare dedicated template and Ansible or is this done automatically based on the provisioning template yeah so great question here um it which is how do I take a device through its entire life cycle from beginning until end so yes absolutely uh one of our applications that we

uh enable through our uh Nautobot application ecosystem is something we call Design Builder and design Builder is designed to do exactly what you’re asking which is how do I manage the configurations of a device and its life cycle uh going from its birth to its final decommissioning and the templates that we create during this process are what enable this so no you do not have to create specific uh decommissioning templates they’re all part of that framework as far as as we move a device in and out of our environment

so great question uh thank you for that one and uh yeah absolutely totally enabled through that ecosystem within Nautobot let’s see uh got another one coming in here um if incorporating automations can lower our operating costs and quickly pay back the cost of implementation how can we ensure we’re choosing the right automations to achieve this so basically where do I start how do I know where to go uh you know what what where do I begin this process and make sure I’m making the right decisions here

so this is something that we see consistently across our client base this challenge of understanding uh what do we have today uh where we need to go and and how do we align all of the things to get to that goal uh and this is something that we often do with our clients we call it a strategic architecture design and Analysis it’s a very highly focused assessment that’s going to come in and interview your teams um ask questions of them really understand both the technical and business challenges and then make sure that we align the

uh those the future to where we’re trying to go so taking what you have today all of your tools we don’t want to just go rip and replace we don’t want to increase technical debt we want to understand the challenges you have and then utilize those tools as much as possible to get where you’re going so often what we’re doing is really stitching together those existing tools as opposed to ripping and replacing um creating a holistic framework or fabric within your environment to help you move forward without having to say just take everything out right

because that’s definitely not the objective here okay great question thank thank you for that one uh got another one so thanks to all for participating appreciate it uh in some cases uh having multiple versions of configurations is necessary uh yeah so like we were talking about earlier we saw that screen where we saw that big mess right and we tried to get to one consistent version of that but sometimes you know that’s not possible like we do need to have variations for any number of reasons they’re usually technical

uh but uh how how do we handle that maybe different qos policies um and can Nautobot manage such Nuance variations in configuration short answer is yes uh we deal with this problem in two ways one is a data abstraction that is how do we describe the environment and its data in an abstracted way as possible and that is something that the Nautobot platform enables it enables us to say hey if this device happens to be a spine and it’s in my Paris data center

uh and it’s uh you know participating in this line of business um it needs this configuration versus maybe this other device is a leaf and it’s over in my Amsterdam data center um and therefore it gets a different configuration right so great ways that we can use Nautobot to very specifically apply the appropriate configuration for a given device uh or maybe at a higher level it’s something about my PCI environment yeah I need to make sure that my PCR environment has this compliance in it right

another great example of ways we can use Nautobot to enable that concept okay uh more questions here let’s see does Nautobot discovered network devices absolutely uh we have a device onboarding application it’s designed to go out and scan an IP or range of ips um to uh pull in as much information as we can about that essentially we give the application uh some credentials uh to attempt to log in with it can be a series of credentials if you need

uh we’re going to interrogate the device we’re going to automatically discover what it is so we’ll learn that for example that it’s a Cisco iOS device this is its serial number it has 48 ports these are all the IP and the banss configured on it Etc and we can automatically ingest that into Nautobot so absolutely make it as easy as possible to ingest your existing your Brownfield environments into that database okay uh another question here um I often face objections about automation potentially making mistakes

um how should we address these concerns and what strategies can we use to minimize these risks yeah yeah great one that comes up all the time most of our clients ask us this which is maybe some of my Engineers or my managers they’re concerned about using automation because they’re afraid it’s going to make things worse so we talked a little bit about this uh during the OS upgrades part of the webinar but here’s a here’s a good practical example uh in all of the automations that we build we always want to ensure that we have pre-checks and post checks that is we’re going to go check something before

we make the change so we ensure that it’s in the state we expect it to be before we make that change um we document any data we need in order to understand the process and then we can do a comparison uh after the change has been made to ensure that it’s in the state expected uh OS upgrades is a great example of this because usually there’s a lot of steps that we need to check before we go do that and one of the interesting things that comes out of using automation is this which is over time inevitably we run into Little edge cases where a problem occurs that

we hadn’t ever experienced before and as humans we say cool we make a note of it uh we deal with it uh we usually go update some documentation maybe a Confluence stock or a SharePoint uh uh document whatever it might be wherever we do our team documentation so let’s just say that that problem occurs next you know the next outage or the next uh time we do an upgrade and uh it’s a different engineer most likely that other engineer is not aware of that update that happened in Confluence or that that problem happened and they run into the same problem

and they do exactly the same things and they spend lots of time troubleshooting and we go through all this all over again but let’s now imagine we were in a world where we were using automation so automation we run into a problem a human investigates so up there’s this Edge case we’ve never run into before okay we need to add that to our pre-checks so instead of going and updating some Confluence stock that no one’s ever going to look at again we update our code our pre-check code

now the next time the that automation runs it’s going to go through and run through that check so we can drive consistency over time which means that problem that we ran into will never happen again when we use Automation and therefore over time we can actually drive more consistency and better delivery into our environment into our Network in in a way that is simply not possible with humans because with humans it doesn’t matter how much documentation we do we are just as likely to make the same mistake

uh next week as we were today and it’s really hard to eliminate that from our process so great Advantage here to using Automation and the idea of pre-checks and post checks to sure we can have good consistent clean change in our environment uh one of the primary drivers behind using intent based networking and network automation is this idea clean consistent change every time uh we know that when we do something in the environment we’re going to get the same consistent repeatable output from the solution

um versus when we do it by hand generally it’s not going to be that way in fact it’s never going to be that way right we’re always going to run into different challenges so I know that was pretty long-winded answer there but that was a really interesting question I feel like hopefully that really G give you some color behind some of these ideas as far as what we need when we’re looking at Network automation okay another question coming in uh Integrations needed for automation seem quite complex yeah

uh and are there simpler areas where we could just you know get started making progress today so for sure uh some use cases are you know things like OS upgrades right this is a pretty complex story um and it definitely involves a fair amount of foundational work in order to get to the point where we start to really leverage it and take advantage of it uh areas where we can get started right away uh one is getting in a a good Network source of Truth tool like Nautobot

uh deploy that get that and populated with data and start using it to understand my existing environment versus where I wanted it to be that is Nautobot golden config app this is a great place to start and in fact it’s where most of our clients do start that is with Nautobot and the golden config app um allows us to say hey next time you come into an audit uh whether it’s your regular uh you know annual internal audit or maybe you have some compliance requirements you get external audits

uh and and you know inevitably I know in environments that I worked in every single year we would always have findings um we never could go through an audit basically without findings that we had to go remediate uh now we can plan for that we can actually ensure our network is uh maintaining the proper hygiene uh so when we come into our audits we know with confidence that we’re going to fly through with with passing colors we’re not going to have any problems because we’re actually running the environment the way that it’s meant to be and the way that I think about

this and I think one of the major advantages you see from this method is this which is when we treat audits as something that a hurdle that we have to get through every year what that means is that we’re just striving for the bare minimum we’re just hoping to get through uh we’re not taking really the spirit of the law right the reason those compliance regulations exist is because we’re trying to have uh safe networks secure networks reliable networks those are the reasons they exist

so let’s Embrace that let’s embrace the spirit of that notion and actually drive that into our Network and this is what we can do with a tool like golden config we can ensure our network is actually operating and the ideal state that we want it to be not just hoping that it’s there okay thank you for all those questions those were great uh looks like it’s slowing down I don’t see any new ones popping in if you do have additional questions please feel free to fire them into the Q&A we have just

another minute or so left so please feel free to get them in there here before we wrap up uh couple of things here for you um some training uh this is absolutely key as you look at your teams and how do I take them from where they are now to where I want them to go we definitely need to Loop in training where possible and this is a big part of what we do as a business really enabling your teams to leverage uh Automation and code uh so learning things like Ansible and python but particularly learning understanding the things that they need to know

as a network engineer or network operator you know we’re not going to teach them things that don’t matter uh they’re really going to come out with practical uh tools and skills that they can start implementing and using in the environment right away um so anywhere from you know that package one just getting started with network automation all the way up through really complex and deep topics like Telemetry monitoring analytics all available for you here in training at Network to Code ah

so so what we went over today uh we learned how intent-based networking and Nautobot delivers outstanding outcomes that make your organization more productive and reduces operational risks um we also gave you some real world and practical examples of intent-based networking in action so hopefully you found that interesting and exciting uh and we loved having you here today thank you for attending here’s some links to all things Nautobot and network to code and if you’re interested please do reach out for us to a demo there’s a QR code there that’ll take you to a link you can schedule that

and get some time with us and we’re happy to take you through a one-on-one demo and really show you the details of how Nautobot can improve your operating environment