USE CASE
Network automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Overview
As network operations expand in scope to accommodate remote workers, new technology, multivendor solutions, and edge devices, it’s becoming more challenging to manage networks across hybrid cloud environments. To keep up with complex tasks that span from data centers to edge locations, network teams must turn to automated NetOps.
With automated NetOps, network engineers can use a variety of automation techniques to perform management and maintenance tasks, as well as respond automatically when conditions change across a network.
Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform is a unified, flexible automation solution that can be used to automate entire network and IT processes across devices and domains. Whether you’re starting from scratch or accelerating your automation strategy, Ansible Automation Platform helps you build more efficient NetOps processes and more resilient networks.
Manage device complexity
Manage all of your existing networking gear—including switches, routers, load balancers, and firewalls—with a single, unified platform. Reuse network CLI commands you already know and start automating easily across a wide range of networking platforms.
Automate the controllers
Software Defined Network (SDN) controllers can manage specific networking domains, but what if you have multiple SDN platforms? Ansible Automation Platform can “manage the managers” and use the same automation language across multiple network domains.
Implement event-driven NetOps
Build NetOps processes on trusted telemetry and automate routine tasks to free time for innovation. Use event-driven automation to perform targeted maintenance, limit outages, quickly address security risks, refresh service tickets, enforce standard configurations, and perform backups.
Accelerate network operations
Automatically update the “source of truth” repository and configure network devices consistently. Complete work quickly and enforce configuration policies. Backup and restore devices from multiple vendors using a single automation platform.
Control “source of truth”
Automate and integrate inventory systems, IP Address Management (IPAM) tools, GitHub repositories, and “source of truth” solutions. Retrieve and store device configurations and push trusted configurations to your network. Automatically collect network facts to inform preventive maintenance.
Close skills gaps
Codify operational knowledge and domain expertise into automation projects so that your entire team—regardless of skill level—can manage your day-to-day network operations for optimal consistency and accuracy. Automate high-volume tasks to improve overall efficiency and free time for other priorities.
Want some hands-on experience?
Red Hat offers interactive labs in a preconfigured Ansible Automation Platform environment. You can use these labs to experiment, practice, and learn how to use event-driven techniques to respond to changing network conditions with end-to-end automated responses.
Features
Workflow automation
Build workflows to automate entire operational processes, with any number of Ansible Playbooks, updates, or other workflows—regardless of whether they use different inventories or run across different users. This makes it easier to automate across complex processes and multiple network and IT teams.
Extend automation to the edge
Consistently deploy remote sites, extending security controls and policies from the datacenter, across clouds, to edge locations. Use Event-Driven Ansible to automate compliance audits, the configuration of dependencies to support endpoint applications, and remediation actions.
Scalable multivendor automation
Manage any network size or layout with a scalable automation solution that includes automation mesh to package dependencies and bring automation closer to its targets. Add resiliency, execution capacity, and flexibility to scale your automation across multivendor environments.
IT Service Management-ready
Update configuration databases, manage tickets, and enable closed-loop responses to IT Service Management (ITSM) tasks with the Ansible Certified Content Collection for ServiceNow ITSM. Use Event-Driven Ansible to automate ITSM processes and integrate with authentication and authorization systems.
Continuous logging with audit trails
Securely log network and automation activity, with audit trails to document who ran the activity, how it was customized, and which resources were changed. Store this data securely and export it for further analysis or external logging to supported tools such as Splunk, Loggly, Sumologic, and Elastic Stack.
Rely on trusted automation content
Manage your network using trusted content built on best practices and experience. Ansible Automation Platform offers certified and validated automation content for multivendor networks and security solutions. You can also use content signing capabilities for compliance and other needs.
IDC report: Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform delivers business value
According to IDC research, organizations who standardize operations with Ansible Automation Platform realize benefits worth an annual average of US$14.81 million and a 668% three-year ROI—and improve the efficiency of network management teams by 38%.
Customer success stories
The airline saved at least 5 months in building and testing network device configurations—and continues to expand automation to more efficiently manage over 5,000 network devices.
With help from Red Hat, ANZ New Zealand reduced the time required for end-to-end DNS provisioning from six days to five minutes, a time savings of 99.4%.
ProRail expanded its use of Ansible Automation Platform to accelerate network operations and move toward an integrated, end-to-end automation approach to IT processes.
Keep learning
E-book
Network automation for everyone
Learn how Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provides network automation flexibility and supports NetOps teams.
Webinar
Network automation 101
Watch this session to learn some network automation basics, like how to automate full network processes instead of just one sliver of NetOps.
Blogs
The Inside Playbook
Stay up to date with the latest blogs—written by experts—about developments in network automation.
