Network engineers are facing the daunting task of automating the network while business leaders are trying to understand the costs, risks, and benefits of allocating resources and the budget to do so. The industry has been quick to promote the idea that network engineers need to automate the network. Putting aside the topic of buying commercial products, network teams are questioning where to focus their training and development efforts and how to get started.
The answer is not to start with automating the network. Instead, the focus is on small tasks that are currently causing operational friction between teams.
The first step for network engineers is to identify the tools used by stakeholders on the various teams and become competent with systems that have APIs designed for automation. Perhaps your organization shares information using spreadsheets that expose an API, such as Google Sheets. Learn to interact with such system APIs and you’re well on your way to reducing inter‑organizational operational friction and delivering higher quality network service.
Recognizing Value
For business leaders to see value in network automation, it must be directly tied to metrics used by the business to measure success, not the metrics used by the network team. This is a crucial concept for network teams to recognize. Networks exist for two essential reasons: delivering services that generate revenue and providing IT services. Operational friction is anything that delays a business outcome that has a material impact. A simple example is having to wait on another team, whether it is for information or for them to complete a task that is blocking progress.
The measure of success for automation is not how much it benefits the network team, but how much it benefits the business. The marketplace measures businesses by the agility, velocity, and stability of their service offerings. Business agility and velocity are optimizing the “ah-ha!” to “cha-ching!” effort it takes to launch and deliver services. Business stability is optimizing the “oh no!” to “all clear!” effort it takes when those services are down or at risk. Any tools that reduce time or risk and improve service delivery are valuable to the business.
Understanding Stakeholders’ Systems
Every team in an organization uses tools in its day-to-day work. A network team needs to catalog these systems to understand if they can be automated and if so, how. The goal of this analysis is ultimately to remove as much operational friction as possible.
The most common tool is spreadsheets. Server teams, for example, may produce and share spreadsheets containing information such as servers, switchports, VLANs, and IP addresses . Many other teams consume this spreadsheet – the network team, the voice team, the multimedia team, and so on – and every time the server team updates the spreadsheet, all the other teams might need to update their systems in response.
As a network engineer, you can ensure consistent use of the data by extracting information from the spreadsheet programmatically rather than with traditional copy-and-paste methods. You can use the data to create device configurations, as well as programmatically instrument network monitoring systems. The amount of benefit you get from applying automation via APIs is a function of the rate of change to the spreadsheet. If the spreadsheet changes on a frequent enough basis, then automating the use of the spreadsheet data yields considerable business value.
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