Rich Martin • 00:03
Network and IT teams spend countless hours on manual operational tasks, going from one network system or application to another to gather data, verify network state, and copy and paste information into templates, tickets, and text files. This process is slow, error-prone, and creates a significant backlog of work for network organizations. With Itential’s Intelligent Network Automation Solution, you can orchestrate end-to-end processes to automate changes across cloud, network, and security infrastructure, and include tasks like pre- and post-checks, creating and updating tickets, gathering data from inventory IPAM or other sources of truth, or sending notification messages to other teams. You can accomplish all of this by easily integrating your network and IT systems, along with any existing automations you have, into the Itential platform, and then using them together to build workflows on a low-code, visual canvas. Let’s take a quick look at how that’s done. With Admin Essentials, teams can quickly integrate with different network controllers, cloud platforms, and IT systems and services so they can be utilized together in a workflow for automation and orchestration. Itential has over 300 freely available pre-built adapters in our automation marketplace, which can be downloaded and installed in the platform to connect to your systems.
Rich Martin • 01:18
In addition to adapters, you will also find modular workflow libraries and example use cases that teams can download and immediately start using in their own projects. In addition to adapters, users can freely self-generate integrations to their systems by simply importing a standardized API specification file published by that system’s vendor. This means that you’ll always have the power to integrate with an ever-changing network and IT ecosystem. With Automation Studio, teams can create workflows that automate network changes and orchestrate end-to-end processes using a low-code drag-and-drop canvas. Workflows and other automation assets can be stored in a project, which simplifies organization and collaboration between teams. Workflows are built from individual tasks that transition from one to another following a logical sequence of steps. Different tasks can be selected from a palette that provides access to both network and IT systems that have been integrated into the platform.
Rich Martin • 02:19
By using a transformation task between two different systems, you can easily map and format data output from one system so it can be used in another. Tasks can also reference other applications in the ITENTIAL platform, like this section for Configuration Manager, which is an application that helps manage configuration and compliance for both CLI and API-based network devices and services, allowing you to automate tasks like config backup, change validation, or compliance reports. This parent workflow includes tasks that can run other modular, reusable child workflows. These workflows can be built by network automation teams or downloaded from the automation marketplace. This workflow provisions infrastructure for an application that needs resources from AWS Cloud Networking Services our on-prem Cisco data center routers, and security services managed by Palo Alto Panorama. In addition to automating network changes, these workflows also integrate with other systems like ServiceNow to create and update tickets, Netbox and Infoblox for data gathering to orchestrate the entire infrastructure provisioning process.
Rich Martin • 03:40
Once your project workflows are completed and tested in Automation Studio, they can be published in the Operations Manager and made available for other teams to use directly from a self-service catalog, scheduled to automatically run once or at a custom-defined interval, or to be used by other external systems through an API. You get full-featured authentication, authorization and access controls for every workflow you publish. This enables your organization to safely expand who can utilize your workflows in order to drive greater efficiency for your business. The Itential Automation Platform empowers your network and infrastructure teams to build and publish workflows that can orchestrate end-to-end processes around network changes to securely deliver self-service infrastructure at scale.
