Managing Network Automation Processes for Scale
Managing network automation processes is a critical component of any successful automation initiative. Without an effective process, automation activities would lose the ability to align with business imperatives, and at the same time would lack the structure to reliably and efficiently design, implement, and refine automation use cases.
How to Manage Network Automation
The network automation process provides the framework to start with an initial, narrowly defined network use case and engage a wider audience of stakeholders to determine the broader impact this automation can have for the business and the proper metrics to determine success. Once this is accomplished, this process provides structure and accountability in creating, testing, and deploying automations which are then compared to the defined metrics to understand their real effectiveness to the business.
Planning: How to Select & Prioritize Automations
The objective of the plan phase is to quantify, select, and prioritize use cases to be automated by engaging the appropriate stakeholders in the organization.
Selection
The Automation Architect meets with other IT stakeholders to review the use cases that have been created in order to understand the technical and business requirements required for each use case.
Evaluation
The Automation Architect and IT stakeholders perform a business analysis of the use cases in order to quantify the business benefits (effort reduction, time-to-complete, etc.).
Prioritization
The Automation Architect and IT stakeholders prioritize the use cases for automation based on business impact, complexity or other factors, identifying which key metrics the use cases will impact. High impact use cases will be added to the development queue.
Design & Build Automations
In the Design and Build phase of the process, the technical work to build the automations for the identified use case is accomplished. This involves starting with identifying the technical requirements by the Automation Architect and engaging the Automation Designers and Automation Developers to work on their focused tasks.
Design Overall Automation
The Automation Architect collects the necessary requirements, defines automation(s), evaluates functional requirements, and identifies development requirements based on their discovery.
Design Overall Automation
The Automation Architect collects the necessary requirements, defines automation(s), evaluates functional requirements, and identifies development requirements based on their discovery.
Develop Automation Components
Automation Developers create custom components (workflow tasks, scripts, system integrations, etc.) based on the design requirements determined by the Automation Architect.
Build Automations
Automation Designers construct the complete automation for a use case using a library composed of existing components and newly created components built by the Automation Developers.
Test & Deploy Automations
Once the building of the automation is completed, the test & deploy phase is where the automation now run in a lab environment to determine whether it functions as intended. There may be several iterations between testing and development teams before the automation is determined to be ready for production deployment.
Test
Automation Designers and Automation Testers collaborate to define and execute testing of the use case automation in an appropriate test environment.
Stage
After successful testing, the staging team moves the automation from the test environment to a staging environment for final review and preparation.
Deploy
The automation is promoted to production by the staging team and executed by the operations group. End Users execute automations and provide feedback to Automation Architect and Automation Development teams.
Operations
The Operations process ensures that all live Automations are operating efficiently on the automation platform and any performance metrics are captured for Analysis. This process can help determine and fix any issues related to the execution of the automations.
Admin
Platform Operations maintains the automation platform, performing activities such as:
- Monitoring performance of the system and managing capacity.
- Performing system administration activities on the platform components, such as backup/restore, data grooming, report generation, upgrades, etc.
Support
Platform Operations provides support and troubleshooting for issues related to the platform and execution of the automations in the environment. May engage developers, designers, and architects in the resolution of issues and optimization of the platform or specific automations.
Analysis
Business and Technical Stakeholders review reports and performance on metrics for automations to measure effectiveness and performance of the automation system and individual use cases, using KPIs defined during the discovery process.
Analysis & Calibration of Automations
In the Analysis and Calibration phase of the process, the feedback loop of Automation process is completed. Performance data and metrics collected from running in the live environment is reported back to the stakeholders to determine if they are meeting the proposed requirements and if they are generating the expected business impact.
Data Collection
Platform Operations extracts operational data from the production environment on per automation level to provide data on execution times, frequency, and quantity.
Analysis
Planner and Business Owners analyze the operational data and calculate performance and business metrics to share with executives and report on business impact.
Calibration
Planner and Business Owners compare results with projected impact to identify areas of improvement and to calibrate planning models and development approach based on actual results.
The Itential Automation Platform
Itential’s Automation Platform is a low-code environment for the creation of end-to-end network automations across multi-vendor and multi-domain networks. Automation Studio enables network engineers to quickly and easily design, build and visualize automations for operations, configuration and service lifecycle management in an easy to use, drag-and-drop environment that scales as you grow.
Design & Build Automations
Itential provides a low-code canvas and drag-and-drop interface that enables users to easily design, build, and visualize repeatable automation workflows.
Publish Automations
Itential’s self-service catalogue allows users to safely and securely publish network automations to network and IT teams with full logging and accountability.
Run Automations
Itential provides complete visibility of each step of every automation that is currently running, which includes input and output data for API calls, verbose status messages, and completion time for ever task. Once an automation ha as finished running, these same details are preserved so they can be viewed at a later time.
Analyze Automations
Itential enables automation teams to track metrics on each bob and task and provides info for detailed reporting and analysis of automations, identifies and quantifies time saved per use case, providing the ability to locate inefficiencies and improve your automations.
