Major U.S. Airline Leverages Itential to Automate Software Upgrades, Reduces Time from 4 Months to 4 Hours
INDUSTRY
Airline & Transportation
GOALS
- Keep Pace with Software Updates
- Reduce Time to Automate Use Cases
- Maintain Security Posture
USE CASES
Software Upgrades
INTEGRATIONS
Key Results
Reduced time to build software upgrade automation from 4 months to 4 hours for over 3500 devices.
Expanded automation across multiple teams.
Lowered operational costs associated with software upgrades.
Orchestrated entire processes end-to-end, including pre-checks, post-checks, and change management.
Exposed automation to people without coding expertise.
Scripts Can’t Scale for Software Upgrades
With a nation-wide device inventory of over 3,500 Cisco IOS devices, this major U.S. airline needed to ensure network OS upgrades on a consistent basis. Typically, their network team only had the capacity to perform software upgrades once every 18 months, which caused security concerns. In an effort to find a faster alternative to their manual processes, they started down the path of an Ansible-centric automation approach, using Playbooks and custom code for integration with APIs. This new approach took their best engineer four months to build a single playbook for just one type of device. Realizing that this approach was not efficient, the airline needed to find another solution that could scale.
We had one upgrade window every 18 months due to our team’s capacity. Forget security concerns – that’s a security crisis.
Network Engineer
Why They Chose Itential for Network Automation
By leveraging the Itential Automation Platform, the airline was able to provide an automated end-to-end software upgrade process that included pre-checks, storing and retrieving files, device config backup, post-checks, validated results, and opening and closing tickets. This new process was designed in alignment with Cisco best practices and leveraged their current Ansible efforts. In doing so, they were able to expand participation to their operations team, who could provide the specific CLI commands for pre- and post-checks to ensure it was successful as well as expose automation to people who didn’t have access to execute Python scripts. With Itential, they were able to automate software upgrades at scale through our:
- Support for any network device or type for automating software upgrades in one single platform.
- Low-code workflow canvas for building end-to-end automations using drag-and-drop integration with your IT ecosystem; ITSM, IPAM, notifications, and more.
- Ability to expand automation participate by mitigating the skills gap with our form-driven automation and low-code development environment.
- Robust pre-check and post-check policies with automatic rollback for managing Day 2 change management.
- Ability to leverage existing automation efforts in Ansible and Python, mitigating the need to rip and replace existing work.
- Automation Marketplace offering hundreds of integrations and automation assets.
- The ability to auto-generate integrations for in-house developed systems, to automate the full end-to-end process.
Before Itential, our best engineer took 4 months to write an Ansible script for upgrades that, with Itential we had working by lunch.
Manager of Network Engineering
Scaling Network Automation & Expanding Participation
By leveraging Itential to automate the full end-to-process of their Cisco iOS software upgrades, the airline reduced automation time from 4 months to just 4 hours. Since multiple teams were participating in their automation efforts, they were also able to significantly lower operational costs through the reduction of manual hours. And most importantly, now that they are able to easily upgrade software on their network devices when needed and not have to wait every 18 months, the previous security concerns have been addressed.
