Along with multiple tools comes multiple authoritative data repositories for different classes of information (IPAM, network discovery, network controllers, SD-WAN, and class network configuration tools). In the modern network era, network engineers aren’t afforded the luxury of lead time to gather data by accessing or swivel chairing across each individual source of truth. Without automation across multiple sources of truth, each new source adds an additional delay in deploying new applications and services because of the human intervention required to gather data. These delays add up quickly, and they are one of the overlooked reasons as to why there is so much backlog attached to deploying network infrastructure.
As your team onboards more tools with even more data, automation requires a view into various sources of truth.
Shifting From a Scattered to Unified View of Data
Network teams are challenged with finding the right data at the right time as they have to navigate between multiple sources truth. A unified source of truth is needed in order to conduct proper and meaningful automation.
The Importance of a Single Source of Truth
In most cases, network engineers have to manage disparate sources of truth, requiring them to constantly swivel-chair between systems. This proves difficult to refer to multiple sources efficiently and near impossible to make decisions and changes.
In order to make decisions and changes more effectively and efficiently, network engineers must leverage a platform that integrates with each source of truth and can federate data from these systems as needed for any network automation to create a unified source of truth.
By adopting network automation, organizations can adopt a distributed source of truth by allowing the systems of record and their data to act as the source of truth, mitigating data quality issues and manual errors.
Network Automation Solutions Should Embrace:
- API First – The only way to integrate multiple sources of truth into a unified one is through an API first approach, allowing your systems to talk to each other.
- Data Federation & Transformation – Having unified sources of truth is only impactful when you can fully integrate the data together, while ensuring it speaks the same language.
- Unified View – An abstracted and federated view of the data, processes, and logic from integrated systems enables a single pane of glass across your entire network and management tools for simplifying automation across your organization.
Itential Integrates with Everything in Your Ecosystem
One of Itential’s core capabilities is the ability to integrate and federate across your entire ecosystem. Only then can network teams truly realize the benefits that automation can bring to your organization.
Itential simplifies your network automation ecosystem with out-of-the-box Pre-Built Integrations to hundreds of systems spanning authentication, cloud, controllers and orchestrators, DevOps and NetOps tools, configuration management, inventory, ITSM notifications and messaging, SD-WAN, security, and telemetry and analytics. With the Itential Automation Platform, you can:
- Integrate with Any CLI & API Technology – Over hundreds of out-of-the-box integrations that span across both CLI and API-based technologies.
- Manage Data through Federation & Transformation – Easily consume, transform, and federate any data or modeling language into JSON Schema for easily managing data for automations.
- Achieve Closed-Loop Network Automation – Integrates with monitoring and piplein systems, providing advanced event-driven capabilities.
- Deliver a Network API to IT Teams – A single, aggregated network API that provides network self-service capabilities to other IT teams, enabling easy consumption.
To learn more about Itential’s approach to integration and federation, check out this white paper, “Itential Automation Platform: Network Integration, Federation, & Automation” or watch this on-demand webinar for an in depth discussion the importance of data integration, transformation, and federation for network automation.
Rich Martin
Director of Technical Marketing ‐ Itential
Rich Martin is the Director of Technical Marketing at Itential. Previously, Rich has worked at several networking vendors as a both a Pre-Sales Systems Engineer and Systems Engineering Manager but started his career with a background in software development and Linux. He has a passion for automation in the networking domain, and at Itential he helps networking teams to get started quickly and move forward successfully on their network automation journey.
