W H I T E PA P E R

The Definitive Guide to

Network Automation
Transforming NetOps from Operator-centric
to Machine-centric

January 2022
W H I T E PA P E R

Today’s businesses are digital-centric businesses. Their very

livelihood is based on the ability for their digital infrastructure to
deliver the required level of application services at the levels
needed by the business. And when the network struggles in any
way, so does the business. So it should be no surprise that as
businesses grow, so does the need for their infrastructure to
grow, which takes the form of both scale and complexity. And
keeping it all running is a challenge for even the most mastery in
the network operations space. Today’s NetOps is all about scale.

For decades, NetOps has always been considered a necessary overhead that accompanies the build-out of any
organization’s digital infrastructure, and as the network topologies that create this infrastructure grew in size, so did the
number of staff resources needed to support it. It was quite common to increase staffing in a linear fashion proportional
to the infrastructure size. And all of the operational resources brought onboard needed to have the requisite training for
the majority of technologies in production. But as infrastructure scope and complexity expanded, it is becoming
impractical to simply hire more operational staff and train each of them on everything.

So, the challenge has always been one of capacity and knowledge, and only recently has the linear relationship
between network size and headcount been identified as a strategic opportunity for improvement. Executive teams are
finding their entire business has become a function of successfully keeping their infrastructure up and running. What
they may not have realized is that their global enterprise is likely dealing with thousands of hybrid network operational
service tasks or “tickets” per week. Each service ticket is associated with a specific operation, ranging from simple
firmware updates to a more complicated remediation of a network outage or service degradation. What may be
surprising to these same executives is that the vast majority of these tasks are so similar that more than three-quarters
of all of them can be grouped into just a handful of common tasks that each get repeated over and over again. And it is
this task similarity that provides the strategic opportunity to think differently about how NetOps is conducted and turn to
a smarter approach.

Making the Strategic Choice

IT business leaders are hence faced with the challenge of becoming smarter in how they deal with the operational
overhead derived from scale and scope of their network. And while they have heard for many years about the promise
of automation throughout other parts of the organization, they do not have the background or understanding of how to
incorporate automation into their network operations plan. And no wonder because the term “automation” has always
had a connotation of big software development projects with big budgets, rigid specification requirements and hard
to articulate ROI. Automation has always been perceived as unapproachable for anything except the biggest of
problems. The executive leaders who oversee the digital infrastructure NetOps functions simply don’t know how to shift
from people and labor intensive NetOps to machine-based automation. So, they remain status quo and drown every
day in operational tedium.

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Fortunately, NetBrain has demonstrated to thousands of customers worldwide that network

automation can be easily applied to any operational portfolio, can be used for any size
problem big or small, allows problems that are similar in nature to be machine-driven, and
significantly reduce MTTR in the process. Network automation addresses the scale issue
directly. By creating an infrastructure-aware, smart visual control platform that allows
knowledge and experience to be captured by anyone which then becomes reusable by
anyone, operational overhead decreases. No longer does the traditional operational
overhead need to scale linearly as the network infrastructure itself does. Smarter not bigger.

Network automation squarely fits into the “Day-2” operational planning process, and allows
operators to solve problems once, and then capture and then reuse their efforts, all without
Network any programming of any type. NetBrain makes that resulting automation available to
Automation everyone in NetOps so they can resolve subsequent occurrences quickly and with the same
allows confidence as the original authors of that re-usable knowledge. And it can even be used to
operators to proactively validate and enforce operational rules which must exist to ensure business
applications function properly.
solve problems
once, and then
capture and Your Automation Maturity Journey
then reuse Knowing where your organization currently fits in the network automation journey is
their efforts important from a strategic planning perspective. As maturity progresses from one level to the
next, the operational overhead associated with infrastructure scale decreases. Mean-Time-
To-Repair (MTTR) can be used as a proxy for maturity as it forms the baseline case for a
completely manual network operational plan. You’ll see that as network automation maturity
increases, MTTR decreases. The net difference between the two curves is the very tangible
value network automation and can be used to quantify the ROI.

So, let’s consider the five levels of network automation to help you understand where your
organization currently fits, and give you some insight into the anticipated rewards of making
a strategic commitment to move forward.

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Level 0: Manual Processes for everything

Level 0 is purely manual. It is commonly based on using element management interfaces
such as the CLI, to execute manual operational tasks and is entirely reliant on the operator
or engineer’s individual skills and personal experience. There are no protections nor
guidance and task execution is inconsistent from operator to operator and from day to day.
All provisioning, configuration, and updating of network devices is done manually, and often
under pressure without suitable checks and balances to assure desired results. Worse yet, in
many cases the NetOps teams are in a virtual state of “firefighting” problems as they arise
and the chance of making sometimes catastrophic errors is high. Many of the world’s most
high-profile outages in recent years can be directly traced back to human error associated
with manual network operations. Level 0 should be considered the baseline for most
organizations today and it is the state of network operations that supports their business.

How do
executable
Runbooks Level 1: Leveraging smarter tools Interactively
work? Level 1 or “Interactive” is the first step in the network automation journey. Think of this level as
the guided level of network automation. Engineers and operators can still interact with the
infrastructure components individually, but they do so using an intelligent platform that
READ HOW
understands the underlying infrastructure in minute detail. Every device, platform and
technology are fully enumerated, and the presented management interface provides the
context for successful operational tasks. The platform knows the boundaries of what is
possible and prevents operators or engineers from making changes that will results in
unpredictable or unexpected results. It also allows engineers and operators to capture their
own expertise into reusable automation routines or ‘runbooks’. Level 1 offers guardrails for
any operator or engineer to make informed decisions based on network real-time status and
allows experience and expertise to be shared.

The NetBrain visual console platform makes this all possible. As networks have gotten larger
and more complex, the management interface needs to become more intelligent, especially
as networks incorporate technologies like SDN, SD-WAN, and public cloud. NetBrain not only
provides end-to-end visibility across hybrid networks, but also the ability to drill down into
each segment and isolate network issues on a Dynamic Map that can be updated in real-
time. And the context it brings enables the platform itself to guide the operator or engineer
to help them make informed decisions and execute tasks with a high degree of confidence.
This greatly accelerates problem identification and resolution.

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With NetBrain, NetOps professionals

leverage their own expertise to
automatically record standardized
procedures into a runbook as they detect,
diagnose, and fix issues. Operators no
longer need to log into the individual CLI
for every network device in the affected
segment and then try to piece together how
the devices work together in their head.

Instead of having to deal with the same

problems repeatedly, the task of NetOps is
to dig deep into the root cause of network
problems and then create re-usable
automation routines to solve subsequent
occurrences. From an Automation Maturity
standpoint, it’s not just a matter of
intelligently fixing an error or executing
operational tasks the first time. The
maturity comes from being able to learn
from that experience and then being able
to re-use it again in the future.

Level 2: Facilitating Collaboration amongst peers

Level 2, the “Collaborative” stage, is where engineers and operators leverage their own
knowledge and that of peers to solve similar problems. And since the NetBrain automation
platform uses a no-code approach to creating automation routines, anyone can add to the
organization’s collective knowledge base to be shared with their peers. In essence, this level
of maturity enables subject matter expertise to be available even when the subject matter
In essence, the expert is not.
subject matter
expertise is Automatically capturing this information allows experienced engineers to codify and share
available when their knowledge with less experienced colleagues, effectively leveraging knowledge, from
experienced users to less experienced team members. The next time the same task is
the subject
needed, commonly referred to as Day-2 operations, the runbook can be executed by
matter expert responders without the same level of experience. Even complicated network issues no longer
is not need to be handled exclusively by experts. Level 2 automation maturity allows network
operation teams to increase their collective knowledge, and share resources more effectively.
It allows operational teams to act as a unified resource, rather than a loose collection of
discrete experts.

Level 3: Automatic response to external events

Level 3 or “Triggered” network automation maturity occurs when organizations use network
automation in response to external events, before operators and engineers get involved.
Triggered automation enables any set of actions to be performed in response to external
events, such as when tickets are created by an ITSM system.

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In practice, NetBrain is usually configured

to automatically perform problem
diagnosis, generate dynamic real-time
maps of the vicinity of the issue and text
the performance and needed device or
path health-checks when an ITSM ticket
is created. All of this information is then
published and waiting for operational
staff to begin working on the service
ticket or other incident.

With the information provided by NetBrain

as part of the ticket, the fix for many issues
can be addressed automatically with
runbooks developed over time by the
engineers with the most experience with
that issue. By automating the response to
IT tickets to include a Dynamic Map at the
time of incident and basic diagnostics that
remediate the issue, escalations are
dramatically reduced since all the info
needed, including the fix, is available to
tier 1 engineers.

Level 3 Triggered automation maturity

shifts the operational paradigm from
human-centric to automation-centric.

Level 4: Preventing problems before they occur

NetOps Level 4, the “Preventative” level, delivers enforcement of in-production conditions, running
Automation: tasks continuously in the background. Engineers create tasks based on goals around
event-driven, bandwidth, ACLs, security, etc. Preventive network automation assures that as you introduce
interactive & new applications, all requirements of the existing application are preserved.
proactive At this level, when the system detects common network faults, automation kicks in to analyze
Automation and identify, and ultimately fix, the issue to restore network operations automatically.
Automated runbooks can also be created for compliance purposes, offering standardized
READ HOW reporting processes that meet internal and external audit requirements.

Preventive network automation enables organizations to prevent issues before they affect
production business services. NetBrain’s preventive automation becomes a single source of
truth to establish the network operating conditions required for each application across the
global enterprise, and those conditions can then be automatically assured to exist
continuously. Level 4 network automation maturity is a strategic approach to reducing the
sheer volume of service tasks.

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Network Automation Maturity Enables Business

Most organizations know their average MTTR, so this can be used as the baseline in their
automation journey allowing them to easily measure concrete savings as they progress in
their own maturity. For instance, the four hours that you spend manually executing a service
ticket with CLI, may be reduced to two hours through automation, saving 50%. And with
organizations reporting 5,000 service tickets per month, this yields a monthly aggregate
savings of about 10,000 hours (or approximately 60 operators.) At prevailing engineer hourly
rates, that’s almost $1 million per month!

The knowledge contained within the NetBrain system grows over time as more subject
matter experts contribute their experience, becoming a tireless and virtually unlimited
partner to the support team. As the NetOps team gains knowledge, or new networking
technologies are introduced to the network, troubleshooting methods change and NetBrain
captures these changes automatically, allowing the number of runbooks and guidebooks to
grow to support changes in the network.

Capturing the knowledge of your best engineers also makes your NetOps team stronger and
more impactful to the business. NetBrain facilitates sharing knowledge and improving the
ability of every engineer to address a wider range of network issues without the need for
each engineer to have extensive training on every device and scenario. And when people
leave the company, NetBrain’s network automation platform retains that knowledge and
makes it easy to empower new employees.

How does Automation Maturity Powers Strategic Growth

NetBrain helps As network automation matures, operational efficiency climbs. Organizations that deploy
NetBrain find their staff are more satisfied with their roles, and their value becomes problem
NetOps teams?
solving rather than simply repeating mundane task over and over again. This allows them
time to hone their advanced skills and learn new technologies that are personally rewarding
WATCH VIDEO from a career development point of view. These new skills include deploying and supporting
public cloud networks, establishing highly flexible software-defined networking, data center
interconnect and performance management, or exploring and adopting new digital
transformation technologies.

First Interactive Proactive

Tickets Response Collaboration
Automation Automation
Automation

Reduce first Resolve Prevent problems

response times outages without Improve team from happening
to zero escalation productivity again

With service tasks and tickets numbering into the hundreds or thousands per month, it’s clear
that as enterprises advance their network automation maturity, everything becomes easier.
Everything becomes more defendable. Advanced network automation maturity reduces
costs and increases employee satisfaction while ensuring that a highly functional and easily
supportable network infrastructure is always available for every application installed across
the enterprise, improving the entire bottom line of the company.

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About NetBrain Technologies
Founded in 2004, NetBrain is the market leader for NetOps automation, providing
network operators and engineers with dynamic visibility across their hybrid networks
and low-code/no-code automation for key tasks across IT workflows. Today, more
than 2,500 of the world’s largest enterprises and managed service providers use
NetBrain to automate network problem diagnosis, generate real-time documentation,
accelerate troubleshooting, and enforce enterprise architectural rules.

Further information can be found at https://www.netbraintech.com/. NetBrain® and

the NetBrain logo are registered trademarks of NetBrain Technologies.

Would you like to learn more about how you can use NetBrain
to automate your NetOps processes? Book a Meeting with
one of our solutions consultants for a custom-tailored demo.

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