Integrating Network Automation for Better Monitoring and Performance

Network Monitoring is often considered the key in ensuring an efficiently run network.

However, as the business and its operations keep expanding, network monitoring goes from being a responsibility to become a necessity.

At a larger scale, network issues can result in significant hindrances for the operations.

Network Automation augments the IT team’s network management capabilities by adding a layer of proactivity and efficiency to the existing network monitoring systems.

Network Automation primarily entails intelligent and automated IT sweep to discover and map devices, sophisticated workflows to catalyze automatic configurations, automated troubleshooting, and real-time alerts at the breach of network performance thresholds.

This reduces monitoring costs, eliminates the probability of human errors from the process, and makes adherence to compliance standards easier.

By adding Network Automation capabilities to network monitoring systems, IT teams can attain agility and optimal network performance.

Generally, in the absence of a Network Automation system, the costs to run the network effect would grow faster or similar to its growth.

Network Automation breaks this correlation by helping the NetOps team get a deep understanding of the network’s inter-dependencies with both conventional and cloud assets, performing quick & effective RCA, and allocating the process-based tasks to the automated system.

How Does Network Automation Optimize Comprehensive Performance?

The right network automation will dramatically improve the performance of the entire network.

Network Configuration Management enables essential & critical functions like compliance standard adherence, regular backups, and change management are executed with finesse to ensure optimal performance and consistency.

At the core of Network Configuration Management and Network Automation, it may seem that you are merely reducing human error from the operational processes.

However, Network Automation goes beyond that; it expedites digitalization process, helps in augment productivity and reducing the operating expenses.

Network Automation contributes to two key areas:

1. Automating IT: IT automates otherwise resource-consuming, hardware-focusing, and manual provisioning, configurations, updates and more.

2. Enhanced Network Visibility: It expands the network monitoring team’s visibility to uncover dependencies and provide faster troubleshooting for the network and its security policies.

Network problems become pertinent in organizations where visibility and control on change workflow are not accessible with the NMS functionalities.

Faulty configurations, frequent compliance violations, and conflicts arising in configuration setups are generally key issues behind systemic network problems. Such problems can result in significant challenges for both network performance and business outcomes.

For an experienced network admin who can produce tremendous value for the organization, a large majority of the working day is spent managing a massive set of network devices, mitigating the risk of unplanned outages, and controlling unauthorized configurations.

Features that Unlock Efficiencies

1. Consistent and Reliable Configuration, Upgrades & Backups.

If critical network devices are at risk, they can bring the entire system down even if the issue is small.

Hence it important to automate configurations, A modern NCM platform comes with customizable and standardized change templates that lets you add new device parameters and push bulk updates to thousands of devices without any errors.

Schedule automated upgrades and ensures proper backup with 321 strategy.

2. Timely & Automated Notifications to Control ‘Change’ Disasters.

Network Administrators prefer having granular control over the entire network.

However, as the network scales and more operators, infrastructure, and devices are added, it becomes nearly impossible to manually keep track of each configuration change.

If this leads to unrecorded but potentially critical changes, network damages and outages become almost certain.

With automated notifications delivered via System Logs, SNMP Traps, Emails, and even SMS, Network Administrators always receive timely notifications about configuration changes as to who made the change, the time, date.

This way, they can easily rollback any faulty changes and avoid potential risks.

3. Safeguarding Network Management with Authorized Access

While alerts and backups are great, they are reactive measures even at their fastest execution.

Network Administrators can create safeguarded network management processes by adding role-based authorized access, such as Super Admin, User etc with different levels of permissions.  Only authorized accounts will be able to make changes in the network.

4. Ensure Network Security & Compliance

Vulnerability assessment helps you proactively evaluate and filter network vulnerabilities with rigorous assessments.

On top of this, high-security standards already embedded in your systems ensure a low risk of missed points of vulnerabilities.

Reports help you access all the critical security and compliance data on the go.

5. Updated History for Easier Configuration Tracking

The tool maintains the entire history of device configurations, allowing users to make easy comparisons and check for compliance and standard processes.