Name: Building Network Automations: Integration & Data Transformation Best Practices
Start: 2023-07-26T16:00:00Z
End: 2023-07-26T16:00:49.000Z
Location: BrightTALK
Rating: 0

Itential is the leading SaaS-based platform for hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure, making it easy for enterprise organizations to reduce manual operations and simplify network management from Day 0/1 deployment, Day 2 changes, and beyond. The Itential Automation Platform accelerates your journey from task-based automations to orchestrated processes. 

The ServiceNow platform is quickly becoming more than just a way to manage IT tickets — it's becoming the central hub for everything in IT, including infrastructure. ServiceNow teams are focused on building self-service portals and the underlying IT processes that can complete these requests, but one of the biggest hurdles they run into is how to bridge the gap between requesting network services and automating the actual changes to the infrastructure. Enabling this for the simplest tasks can sometimes take weeks due to lack of resources and complexity to coordinate between multiple groups.

With Itential’s deep integration with the ServiceNow platform, ServiceNow developers can build Flows that utilize Itential Actions that can directly run network automations in the Itential platform to immediately request network infrastructure services for a user. With this solution, network teams can focus on building and publishing network automations to be consumed directly by a ServiceNow Flow.

In this webinar, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing and Ankit Bhansali, Senior Solutions Engineer at Itential, will demo step-by-step how teams can:

• Identify and use Itential Actions in a ServiceNow Flow.
• Authenticate and run an Itential workflow from a ServiceNow Flow.
• Utilize a ServiceNow catalog for self-service infrastructure.
• Utilize Itential’s App to generate dynamic self-service infrastructure.

How to Connect ServiceNow to Your Infrastructure with Itential

Today’s networks are comprised of a mixture of network solutions that are managed by traditional command line interfaces (CLI) and API-based network controllers. As configurations change over time, it’s important that network teams have a flexible set of tools that help them manage these configurations to ensure they are adhering to current best practices and security policies to prevent outages and diminish security risk. 

Some of the most critical configurations use lists of elements, like Access Control Lists (ACLs), that must be ordered correctly, or they can lead to network problems. However, legacy tools are limited in their ability to define rules for lists that can ensure compliance. With Itential, network and security teams have a modern toolset to help quickly build Golden Configuration templates with rules to ensure list ordering, and then automate the process of running compliance audits that can integrate with your systems to orchestrate processes such as managing ServiceNow Incident tickets and notifying groups of non-compliant devices, and even automatically remediate those devices.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will demo step-by-step how teams can:

• Create a Golden Configuration template for CLI managed devices. 
• Apply rules for strict ordering for an Access Control List.
• Apply rules for loose ordering for a NTP server list.
• Utilizing restrictions for items appearing in a list.
• Automating and orchestrating compliance audits using defined rules.

Building Compliance Rules for Ordered Lists in CLI Configurations with Itential

Today’s enterprise IT organizations often rely on multiple public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, along with internal infrastructure to deliver services to their employees and to their customers. Securing these services across both public and private infrastructure remains a challenge for many organizations due to the different features, functions, and management interfaces different teams must utilize to enable a consistent policy, end-to-end, for every service.

With Itential, organizations can build and secure complex hybrid, multi-cloud services by utilizing existing security automations for CLI devices and API integrations into security services or security controllers within a single visual workflow. Over time, as these security policies change state, the Itential platform can track these details to help teams determine how different policies are deployed across both on-prem and cloud infrastructure.

In this demo, Dan Sullivan, Senior Solutions Architect at Itential will share real-world use cases on how customers leverage Itential’s integrations with public cloud providers as well as internal infrastructure to secure both public and private infrastructure. You’ll see step-by-step how to:

• Enable self-service portals to request blocking services for a suspicious user.
• Orchestrate security changes for services across on-prem and cloud infrastructure.
• Track security details for on-prem and cloud infrastructure over its service lifecycle.

How to Track & Orchestrate Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Security Services

If you’re on the network and infrastructure automation journey, you’ve probably found a tool of choice to create automations, and built a ton of different programs, playbooks, or plans to automate all kinds of different network tasks. These tools are most certainly saving you, and those who are using them, time and effort — which is great, but you have the suspicion that much, much more can be done here!

Building automations is a great first step, but engineers quickly realize that these automations still pose efficiency challenges. They’re spending too much time on all the tasks that surround that change – opening and closing tickets, gathering data, updating sources of truth, etc. 

The Itential Automation Platform provides a way to quickly stitch all of your existing automations together in an orchestrated workflow with out-of-the-box integrations to systems and services in your unique environment, a visual drag-and-drop canvas, and a library of pre-built modular components. This makes it easy to orchestrate your existing work together to build end-to-end workflows that gather data, make and verify network changes, and update systems and services.

In this demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show step-by-step how teams can:

• Orchestrate your existing Python, Ansible, or OpenTofu automations.
• Integrate with systems like ServiceNow, IPAMs, Inventory using pre-built components.
• Build additional pre- and post-check processes quickly for end-to-end services.
• Create a visual orchestrated workflow that leverages everything you’ve already built and stitch it all together.

Extend Your Network Automations through Orchestrated Workflows with Itential

AWS provides an impressive set of tools that IT teams use to automate infrastructure changes in the AWS cloud platform. These tools automate specific tasks and are often used manually, one after another, to fulfill a larger request. By orchestrating these tasks together and managing them as a service offering over time, organizations can respond faster to requests and more efficiently utilize cloud resources.

By using the Itential Automation Platform, IT teams can quickly integrate with any cloud platform, such as AWS, and leverage native APIs to build orchestrated workflows that can automate network and infrastructure changes along with other, non-infrastructure tasks, like documenting changes and managing tickets. There's also a simple process to define a service and track it over time to ensure that expensive cloud resources are properly utilized.

In this webinar, Joksan Flores, Senior Solutions Engineer at Itential, will demo step-by-step how teams can:

• Automate AWS infrastructure like EC2, Certs, and ELB to provide application scaling. 
• Orchestrate processes to include ServiceNow ticket management along with infrastructure automation.
• Define related details for the application's infrastructure services in a JSON schema.
• Manage application services through multiple lifecycle stages.

Orchestrate & Track Cloud Infrastructure Services for Application Scalability

In the fast-evolving telecom industry, launching innovative offerings and optimizing existing services is not just an objective; it’s a critical necessity. To accelerate time-to-revenue and slash fulfillment overheads, communication service providers (CSPs) must minimize the time and expense of introducing new services and fast-track the evolution from fragmented, complex, error prone and manually intensive processes to fully automated service fulfillment.

By connecting ServiceNow to your infrastructure with Itential’s new ServiceNow OMT App, CSPs can accelerate their time to market by quickly incorporating orchestrated network services into their new and existing products, standing out in a competitive market.  

Itential’s multi-domain orchestration platform enables CSPs to create unique services that can combine their network capabilities with third party services and capabilities, such as cloud, security, and interconnect. When combined with ServiceNow’s industry leading order management solution, CSPs can quickly define innovative new services with the ability to scale order volumes and meet next-generation service complexity.

Join us for a live webinar where Morgan Stern, VP, Automation Strategy at Itential and Karan Munalingal, Head of Solutions Engineering at Itential will discuss and demo: 

• The robust capabilities of the Itential ServiceNow OMT app for service order management. 
• What both ServiceNow and Network teams can achieve by leveraging the two solutions together. 
• How to create a service specification and publish to ServiceNow catalog.
• How to incorporate Itential-published services into customer services.
• How to place an order through ServiceNow for the new service and how to orchestrate the fulfilment through the Itential Automation Platform.

Orchestrate Service Order Fulfillment with the Itential App for ServiceNow OMT

Service Providers and Large Enterprises who view network infrastructure as a resource to be offered as differentiated services to customers will face challenges in managing those services over the lifetime that they operate. When a service is initially deployed, it will require multiple network resources to be allocated and configured along with customer, service, and ticket identifiers associated with the service instance. As the service moves from one lifecycle stage to another, this data can change making it challenging to track and update, and when a service is cancelled some resources may not be deallocated if updated tracking hasn’t been maintained. 

To efficiently manage a multitude of complex network services at scale, organizations need stateful orchestration, which is the ability to automate any network changes, orchestrate end-to-end service processes, and flexibly update and track a multitude of different data types related to each service.

Whether it’s tracking details of a set of network devices, like VLANs, IP Addresses or ACLs, or managing intricate network services that span routers, firewalls, cloud, and IT systems, Itential’s Lifecycle Manager (LCM) can help. With LCM, teams are able to leverage stateful orchestration to keep tabs on infrastructure resources, critical details, and current statuses for all services by using workflows to automate common management processes and keep resource information up to date.

Join us for a live discussion and demo where Peter Sprygada and Rich Martin will show you how to:

• Understand LCM’s Stateful Orchestration features and identify relevant use cases.
• Create a Resource Model for tracking data for a service.
• Associate a workflow to an Action that will operate on a service instance.
• Manage a service’s lifecycle process using Create, Update, and Delete Actions.
• Review a network service’s details and history throughout its lifetime.

Itential's Stateful Orchestration Capabilities: Deploy & Manage Network Services

IT organizations spend a significant amount of effort keeping up with changing application and infrastructure requirements, which often requires changes to network infrastructure such as firewall rule access, load balancer provisioning, etc. This process can take longer than anticipated due to manual processes required to coordinate between app, network, and infrastructure changes. This can create a serious time lag on productivity and velocity. With Itential’s latest release of its ServiceNow App, Application teams are now enabled to self-serve network and infrastructure services as a fully automated processes – bridging the gap between IT Apps and the network. 

This new release introduces Itential Actions that can be directly embedded in a ServiceNow Flow. These Actions give ServiceNow teams access to a self-service catalog that enables their IT processes to directly gather operational network data, request new network resources, or orchestrate changes across multiple network domains. This means that any IT request that experiences delays due to manual network processes can now be automated as easily as other IT resources, enabling you to deliver IT services at maximum efficiency.

Join us for a live demo where Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you how to:

• Publish an automation in Itential to provide self-service infrastructure in ServiceNow.
• Build a Flow that queries network inventory and operational data for dynamic use in ServiceNow.
• Build a Flow to qualify network resource availability for a new service or site.
• Build a Flow to provision a new network service as part of a larger IT request process.
• Understand how Itential Actions enable self-service automation through Example Flows.

Itential ServiceNow App: Network & Infrastructure Automation in ServiceNow Flow

Network as a Service (NaaS) is gaining momentum as cloud service consumers have come to expect their network providers and teams to offer the same simple level of accessibility they’ve become accustomed to in the cloud world. However, many have learned that delivering networking capabilities as a service presents significant challenges that don’t exist in cloud networking.

Exposing network services based on functionality like IP layer 3, core networking, optical, and functions like firewall and load balancing depend on a network infrastructure that can be managed and orchestrated across silos and domains with consistent, predictable capabilities that are robust enough to be exposed as services.

In this webinar, Itential’s Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy, and Travis Nicks, Solution Architect, will discuss the challenges of providing true hybrid, multi-cloud Network as a Service along with lessons learned from NaaS implementations in some of the most advanced service provider and enterprise networks in the world.

Join us to learn: 

• Key capabilities required to deliver robust NaaS.
• Challenges of orchestrating exposable hybrid network services.
• Lessons learned in enterprise and service provider NaaS initiatives.

Deliver Network as a Service Capabilities Across Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Selecting a network automation and orchestration solution that meets your organization’s needs can be difficult. As the number of tools that claim to enable network automation increases, it’s becoming more complex to determine the capabilities you need and select the right tool for the right job.

When adopting a network automation solution, your organization needs to be sure that the investment is worthwhile — many options have challenging limitations which may only become clear down the line. That’s why it’s critical for organizations to understand what they’re trying to automate and build a cohesive strategy around it, so they can evaluate the right network automation solution to achieve their goals.

In this webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy at Itential, will share how organizations can evaluate the right network automation solution to implement for success. You’ll learn:  

• How to define the network change process and build an automation strategy that supports your business needs. 
• Which capabilities you should expect of any modern solution to help expose, enhance, and extend your automations.
• The 10 most important criteria to consider when comparing and evaluating your network automation options and the right questions to ask for each. 
• Red flags to avoid and why.

Evaluating Network Automation Solutions: Top Criteria to Consider

Both on-prem & cloud network infrastructure are critical for companies to deliver services faster to customers, but managing & securing this important resource requires infrastructure & security teams to identify issues quickly & react immediately to avoid outages or breaches. Manually identifying these events from massive amounts of infrastructure telemetry data & responding with manual processes increases outage times & security risk. Infrastructure & Security teams require tools that can identify & prioritize critical events & immediately run automated responses across all infrastructure.

Today, you can leverage Kentik’s ability to collect cloud & network telemetry data & generate intelligent alerts based on your organization’s requirements. When integrated with Itential, these alerts can immediately trigger an automation for the entire end-to-end remediation process, which can include updating infrastructure, managing incident response processes, & notifying teams. Combining both platforms enables enterprises to build closed-loop automations that respond to security & infrastructure events in real time.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing, Itential & Leon Adato, Principal, Technical Evangelism at Kentik, will demonstrate how to utilize the Kentik Observability Platform with the Itential Automation Platform to build automations that rapidly respond to cloud, network, or security infrastructure events & update teams & critical IT systems. You’ll see how to: 

• Leverage Kentik to generate Alerts for AWS infrastructure & trigger an Itential automation.
• Acknowledge the Alert Event in Itential, extract & transform data provided by Kentik platform.
• Automate the Change Request & Incident processes in ServiceNow for audit & documentation.
• Validate data & automate logic to update AWS Security Group or determine another course of action.
• Update Infrastructure & Security teams of the event & the automated response in MS Teams.

How to Build Closed-Loop Automation in Response to Infrastructure Events

For organizations ready to take the final step in their network automation journey, they’re looking to evolve from process orchestration to self-serve networking. Self-serve networking exposes the process orchestrations already built to a larger set of end users, providing capabilities like Network as a Service via APIs. 

The business impact of this transition is significant. Organizations who succeed with implementing self-service can provide the best experience for end users and customers, delivering more services in less time across their complex hybrid, distributed infrastructure.

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will walkthrough: 

• How the transition to self-service networking becomes a benefits force multiplier.
• The components of a self-service model and the tools and technologies that enable it.
• Lessons learned by teams who have successfully transitioned to self-service networking.
• How Itential supports self-service with its northbound API exposure capabilities.  
• The perspective of an engineer and what’s needed to evolve to make your automations become self-service for end users.
• The perspective of IT leaders and what’s needed to set your team up for self-service networking success.

Network Automation Maturity: From Process Orchestration to Self-Serve Networking

Network teams are spending more and more time building automations for their day-to-day tasks – scripts and other assets that are intended to be used personally, or among a very small group of trusted team members. However, most are seeing the need to expand the audience who can run these automations to increase the efficiency of their organization’s IT operations. This can be accomplished by exposing what the team has already built to other applications and platforms. The question is, how can you do this safely at scale? 

To do this successfully, network teams need a platform that enables them to quickly create network automations that they trust, and securely publish these automations to be consumed by other teams, applications, and platforms. The Itential Automation Platform provides all the tools needed for network teams to confidently build and expose their network automations as services that can be run from IT systems like ServiceNow or as part of a DevOps Pipeline.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will show you step-by-step how to:

• Build and publish a workflow for use by the network team.
• Build and publish a workflow for use by end users in ServiceNow. 
• Build and publish a workflow for use in a DevOps pipeline.
• Utilize Operations Manager for access control, data validation, and job auditing.

How to Publish & Expose Network Automations as a Service to Accelerate Adoption

Individuals and teams that are ready to take the next step from networking and infrastructure task automation, are looking to evolve to the next phase of their network automation maturity – process orchestration. This takes automation a step further to encompass the full end-to-process surrounding networking tasks such as responding to or closing an IT ticket, performing configuration validation, and communicating with sources of truth.  

However, when assessing the best route to evolve teams quickly to this next stage, they realize that the tools which enabled their success in automating tasks lack the capabilities required to orchestrate end-to-end processes at scale. 

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will walkthrough: 

• Why teams should consider process orchestration and the benefits it can bring.
• The challenges and opportunities involved in the transition. 
• The challenges involved with moving to process orchestration from a task-based approach.
• Lessons learned by teams who have successfully transitioned to process orchestration.
• How Itential helps you evolve your automations to touch every part of the process with its patented integration capabilities. 
• The perspective of an engineer and what’s needed to evolve your automation efforts to encompass end-to-end processes. 
• The perspective of IT leaders and what’s needed to set your team up for process orchestration success.

Network Automation Maturity: Evolving Task Automation to Process Orchestration

GitHub is an incredibly popular platform that is primarily used by programmers to collaborate, track, and share files and code for projects they are working developing and maintaining. Because of features like file sharing, versioning, and tracking GitHub has also found popularity with a multitude of groups outside of developers. In fact, more and more networking teams who are looking to automate network processes find that they need to have a common data source for network information — and GitHub is one of those platforms they turn to in order to implement that source of truth for network data like ACLs, inventory, and more.

With the Itential Automation Platform, integration with GitHub (and any platform, tool, or system) can be accomplished quickly with just a few clicks and will open up the entire library of API methods that can now be used in a network automation that you can build in a low-code, drag-and-drop workflow canvas.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Technical Marketing Engineer at Itential, will demonstrate how to integrate GitHub with the Itential Automation Platform to use for network automation. In this live demo, we will step-by-step how to:

• Quickly generate an integration with GitHub with OpenAPI.
• Investigate API methods from GitHub and use them as Tasks.
• Build a workflow to Create, Read, and Update files from a GitHub repo.
• Utilize files from GitHub as a data source for common network information.

How to Use GitHub as a Common Data Source for Network Automations with Itential

The first step for every network team getting started with network automation is to create automations for individual activities. As network engineers start to investigate automation, their initial thoughts usually revolve around “what” tasks to automate and “how” they can automate those tasks. This is an incredibly helpful and useful first step into automation, and with the right tools and frame of reference, a lot of a network engineer’s daily backlog can be overcome. When these first steps are taken, it’s important to also find ways to effectively manage your automations and engage and collaborate with other team members around these automation assets.

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will share insights gathered from their time spent working with our customers who have implemented task-based automation successfully, including: 

• Assessing use cases, automation tools, time, and skills. 
• Expected benefits of implementing task-based automations.
• Required toolset capabilities to successfully manage and run your automations.
• Lessons learned from teams who have been successful with task automation.
• How Itential can help organize, share, and secure your scripts for extended use. 
• The perspective of an engineer and what’s needed to evolve your task automation efforts. 
• The perspective of IT leaders and what’s needed to set your team up for task automation success.

Network Automation Maturity: Evolving from Limited to Task Automation

As a network engineer, the fun part of the job (and what you were actually hired to do) is real network engineering and making the network operate more securely and efficiently. However, the reality is that making changes to the network also requires that we document those changes in great detail — both before and after the changes are made. Now that network uptime, performance, and security are more important than ever, process and documentation are also critical, and many times network teams spend more time opening, updating, and documenting issues in platforms like Jira than they do working on the network. 

By integrating the Itential Automation Platform with the Jira Work Management platform, network teams can reclaim valuable time by automating these manual steps, freeing them up to continue to improve the network and positively impact everything that utilizes the infrastructure.

In this live demo, Rich Martin, Technical Marketing Engineer at Itential, will show step-by-step how to save time and effort by automating the change management process that surrounds network changes as well as the changes themselves:

• Generate an integration to Jira Work Management Cloud Platform.
• Create new issues and set initial fields using a Data Transformation.
• Update comments on issues with network details captured from pre- and post-check tasks.
• Automate transitions to progress an issue’s status from open to completion.

How to Integrate Jira with Itential to Automate Change Management Process

Overall adoption of network automation and orchestration has grown steadily in the past few years, but within and across an organization, the rate of adoption can vary greatly. Clear patterns have begun to emerge. Individuals begin with scripts to automate tasks. Those can then grow into larger automations, usually with team-wide participation, and in some cases evolve into end-to-end orchestrations and self-service. As the approach to automation evolves, its benefits can expand in scope across the organization. 

Based on direct experience working with hundreds of teams and the observations of thousands of projects across the community, Itential experts have developed the Network Automation & Orchestration Maturity Model. The purpose of the model is to define consistent stages that can be used to measure progress in automation and orchestration teams and initiatives, which will help engineers and business leaders alike to maximize the impact of automation and orchestration. 

In this live webinar, Morgan Stern, VP of Automation Strategy and Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, will walkthrough: 

• Why maturity models matter in emerging technology areas. 
• How engineers and teams can use the maturity model to improve their successes in automation. 
• How business leaders can use the maturity model to measure their current capabilities and improve their long-term automation strategies.

Intro to the Network Automation Maturity Model: How to Assess Where You Are

Building Network Automations: Publishing & Sharing Automations

Building Network Automations: Building Your Modular Automation Library

Building Network Automations: How to Get Started Step-by-Step

Building Network Automations: How to Create Logical Steps for Your Use Case

Building Network Automations: Introduction to Itential’s New Workflow Canvas

How to Build an Itential Workflow to Automate Any Network Change Process

Getting started with automating network infrastructure requires a logical, step-by-step approach, which Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, outlines in the following demo specifically focused on integration and data transformation. Martin will show you step-by-step how to: 
• Self-generate an integration using an OpenAPI specification file from NetBox. 
• Utilize newly integrated API tasks for IP Address requests and Inventory query. 
• Create a Data Transformation to manipulate data for network changes. 
• Build, run, and test the workflow using Operations Manager.

Watch the third part of this demo series on how to build automated workflows with Itential, as Martin continues to build upon the workflow from the previous demo. Now that your use case is fully built out with the pre-check, network change, and post-check processes, it’s time to add in integrations with the systems in your ecosystem and data transformation between those systems. This allows for a fully automated end-to-end process.

Building Network Automations: Integration & Data Transformation Best Practices

Network Automation

IT Automation

Network Management

APIs

Automation

Network Architecture

Hybrid Cloud

API Management

Data Transformation

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Building Network Automations: Integration & Data Transformation Best Practices

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