Book Image

Practical Network Automation - Second Edition

By : Abhishek Ratan
Book Image

Practical Network Automation - Second Edition

By: Abhishek Ratan

Overview of this book

Network automation is the use of IT controls to supervise and carry out everyday network management functions. It plays a key role in network virtualization technologies and network functions. The book starts by providing an introduction to network automation, and its applications, which include integrating DevOps tools to automate the network efficiently. It then guides you through different network automation tasks and covers various data digging and performing tasks such as ensuring golden state configurations using templates, interface parsing. This book also focuses on Intelligent Operations using Artificial Intelligence and troubleshooting using chatbots and voice commands. The book then moves on to the use of Python and the management of SSH keys for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, all followed by practical use cases. The book also covers the importance of Ansible for network automation, including best practices in automation; ways to test automated networks using tools such as Puppet, SaltStack, and Chef; and other important techniques. Through practical use-cases and examples, this book will acquaint you with the various aspects of network automation. It will give you the solid foundation you need to automate your own network without any hassle.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Application and use cases

As mentioned, AI in operations can be used in every possible aspect, right from identification of a given task to auto-remediation of the task.

Here are some of the areas where AI helps in the optimization of operations:

  • Identifying the correct set of alerts: As we have lots of infrastructure devices, we rely on SNMP traps or Syslog to gather meaningful insights for any device. There are times when we get hundreds of traps for a particular office or multiple devices, and, as an engineer it becomes very hard to troubleshoot and quickly identify the actual set of problems. As part of data collection and data analytics, using AI, there can be a correlation that can be performed to identify an actual set of problems from multiple alerts. A typical scenario that is tackled through this approach is when there is a power outage on a certain office.

    In the...