Networks are key to the global operations of the world’s largest enterprises. But with enterprise network infrastructure expanding and becoming more complex, it is becoming more difficult to manage network security and optimize performance at scale. An organization might have thousands of devices, cloud services, and other network resources all from different vendors, across dozens of network domains, with many different types of configurations.
To operate effectively and minimize risk, enterprises need to be able to act on threats and issues instantly with automation. But how do you do that across such a complex networking environment?
Itential + Kentik’s Integrated Platforms
To help solve this challenge, we recently partnered with Kentik, bringing their intelligent network observability platform together with our automation and orchestration platform. Automation and observability have long been independent pillars of network innovation. However, as infrastructure becomes increasingly distributed, enterprises require observability data that can be integrated with and drive their automation efforts. By partnering with Kentik, we’re delivering a solution that provides seamless integration between observability and automation platforms at the API level so that infrastructure teams can address issues faster and with more confidence.
Kentik’s observability platform enables organizations to collect telemetry input from all critical network elements and turn that data into insights and actionable alerts for infrastructure teams. Itential enables infrastructure teams to automate network and security configuration changes across hybrid multi-cloud networks, and it quickly integrates with IT systems to enable end-to-end orchestration of the entire change management process across every system and every component of network infrastructure.
With Kentik’s advanced network observability platform combined with Itential’s network-centric automation and orchestration platform, NetOps teams and security teams can build, share, and leverage closed-loop automations in response to intelligently generated network events, ensuring critical infrastructure operates more securely and reliably than ever before.
How Teams Leverage Our Platforms for Success
There are two main categories most use cases fall into. I’ll explain how the integration enables us to solve for these challenges without getting into the specifics of a single vendor, device type, or scenario.
Use Case 1: Achieving 100% Observability Coverage with Automated Device Onboarding
While many organizations are able to stay on top of implementing observability for devices that are expected to persist, gaps often occur with virtual devices that are temporary instances. Virtualization often results in many instances that only persist for a short time, and processes at most organizations ignore adding/removing these to/from an observability platform.
In addition, some devices that are installed into the network environment will occasionally not make it into the network observability platform fast enough or even at all. Over time this means there are certain back corners of a network that aren’t being properly monitored.
Automation solves these challenges. When teams orchestrate the processes used to deploy new devices and add new elements to the network with Itential, they can build in automated steps to always add them to Kentik’s observability platform and validate that they are successfully being monitored. This ensures 100% coverage for network observability, which is crucial to maintaining security and performance across a large and complex environment.
For every device added to Kentik, the platform collects various types of data, such as flow data to determine incoming and outgoing traffic. Then, it intelligently determines whether given activity represents an anomaly. You can be safe in the knowledge that Kentik’s intelligent monitoring reaches your entire network so anything that needs to be addressed can prompt an alert.
Use Case 2: Automated Infrastructure Event Response with Remediation
This is where you sit up a little bit, because by using Itential in tandem with Kentik’s observability platform, you’re able to respond instantly to any issues on your network infrastructure. And for new issues that Kentik flags by intelligently parsing the flow data of all your devices, your network team can build a new automation workflow in a matter of minutes, apply it to all relevant devices, and then set it up to trigger in response to any future alerts of the same type.
With the wealth of data Kentik makes available and the ease with which teams can build automated workflows to orchestrate processes in Itential, it’s possible to take a much more proactive approach to remediating issues. Kentik gives teams the ability to apply rules to monitored data, and the integration with Itential allows for events that generate Kentik alerts to be sent into Itential to trigger an orchestrated process. Teams build a workflow to respond to certain kind of alert, and then the entire remediation process can happen automatically. This approach closes the loop on response and remediation and greatly reduces the manual load on network and security teams.
Of course, it’s impossible to account for everything beforehand. That’s why the dynamic, intelligent alerts that Kentik provides are so valuable — the platform helps teams flag and identify issues quickly, even without anticipating those issues. Then, they can build a new orchestration that responds to the new, unexpected alert, meaning even reactive responses are much faster and more consistent than before.
To understand the value of this, let’s take a situation where a type of router is revealed to have a critical security issue with a specific management configuration. A certain device might be flagged by Kentik once someone accesses it. The network security team responds immediately, reprioritizing to identify and remediate the device in question. After responding to one issue on one device, however, the security team will need to begin checking through all of inventory to identify and remediate potential issues and proactively manage security risk.
This is where Itential’s orchestration capabilities really make a difference — it’s easy to turn a reactive response into another proactive, closed-loop remediation process. After building an Itential workflow to respond to the immediate issue, the team can take that workflow and use it in a modular way, building an end-to-end orchestration that includes: a way to identify the configuration of a router, a step that alerts network and security teams of a flagged issue, and a process for automating ticket management alongside the automated remediation process.
This workflow can be scheduled to run on a regular cadence and check all devices against an inventory or source of truth system, turning a reactive play into a proactive one by automating the remediation process for whenever a similar issue comes up going forward.
Watch a demo of these two use cases
Itential + Kentik: Optimize the Performance & Security of Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Networks
Today’s business demands require your network infrastructure to deliver services across the globe, at greater and greater speeds, to more and more end users. Mission-critical applications demand network resources, and it’s crucial to ensure you can efficiently deploy those resources to deliver the best possible experience at the lowest cost. And, on top of that, the risk of network security breaches has never been higher, as the network becomes more and more important to business outcomes. Your organization needs to be able to respond to threats quickly and efficiently, no matter where they are in your network.
By adopting Itential and Kentik’s integrated solutions, you can ensure that your network and security teams have the tools they need to identify network security issues and opportunities for optimizing network performance, and then automate response and remediation processes with end-to-end orchestration. That means enhanced security response and a more dynamic, flexible approach to delivering network services across your growing and complex network infrastructure.
To learn more about the partnership, click here or check out our joint webinar here.
Mike Elrom
Director of Customer & Tech Partner Enablement ‐ Itential
Mike Elrom is the Director of Customer & Tech Partner Enablement at Itential who has spent his entire professional career working on telecommunications networks. Holding roles within Network Operations and Software Development teams, Mike’s career has naturally progressed into network automation. At Itential, Mike has the pleasure of working with our customer’s network engineers while he and his team are responsible for enabling our customers to become successful automation engineers.
