Comparing BPMN Tools & Itential Network Automation
Business Process Management Notation Tools
Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) and BPMN tools, like Camunda, are designed to graphically represent business processes:
- Best suited for defining business process flows and higher-level business logic execution.
- Designed for interactions with microservices.
- Efficient at defining high-level cross-team, cross-organization processes.
Itential Network Automation & Orchestration Platform
Network automation workflows, as provided by the Itential Automation Platform (IAP), are used to represent network automation and orchestration processes:
- Best suited for defining detailed network automation/orchestration processes.
- Designed for interactions with network, cloud, configurations, and network services.
- Efficient at defining detailed network and service configuration activities (order of operations, config compliance, pre-/post-check activities, etc. These functionalities are native capabilities of the platform and require zero development.
Integrating BPMN Tools with the Itential Automation Platform
- Itential Automation Platform can integrate with BPMN tools to provide advanced network automation capabilities and exposure of unique IAP functionality to BPMN environments.
- Itential features/functions can easily be incorporated into existing BPMN workflows.
- BPMN users can immediately benefit from the features and capabilities of Itential to extend the functionality of their BPMN workflows.
- Itential provides options to integrate Itential features/functions into existing BPMN environments at multiple levels – task, workflow, etc.
Why Itential for Network Automation & Orchestration
Itential provides features and functionality not provided by Native BPMN-Based Platforms and can easily integrate with existing BPMN environments to expose these capabilities to BPMN users.
Network Configuration Lifecycle Functionality
Native capability to provide network configuration lifecycle, Golden Configuration, compliance checking and remediation.
Dynamic Task Creation
IAP will autogenerate tasks as part of the Adapter Builder functionality, no coding required.
Data Transformations
JSON Schema Transformations (JSTs) enable no-code creation of data transformation rules that can be called by automations to execute at runtime.
Command & Analytic Template Functionality
- Command Templates are run-time templates that actively pass commands to a list of specified devices during runtime.
- Analytic Templates are pairs of commands that utilize responses that have been collected by the Command Templates. The output Analytic Templates is evaluated according to a set of associated analytic rules.
Federation & Dynamic Inventory of Connected Objects (Devices, Services, etc.)
- Provides a real-time view of connected assets.
- Simplifies execution of automation logic, generic automations can be performed across disparate southbound technologies, such as configuration lifecycle and compliance.
