How to automate networks with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Streamline and speed network management with advanced automation
Traditional approaches to network management are too complicated and error-prone to effectively support the networking requirements of modern cloud environments. Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform streamlines network management activities to help you meet rapidly changing demands for capacity, load balancing, and multicloud integrations. Automate multivendor network infrastructure across campus, branch, cloud, and edge environments at scale using a single, unified platform. And expand automation across your organization with a simple, human-readable language, flexible architecture, and security-focused sharing and collaboration capabilities.
Here are 3 ways Ansible Automation Platform can help you define a path to network efficiency while still supporting current processes.
1. Increase network visibility
Comprehensive visibility into network operations can help you maintain reliability, optimize performance, and efficiently address potential service disruptions. Detailed reports let you rapidly identify and remediate noncompliant, vulnerable, and obsolete hardware, software, and configurations to boost the performance and reliability of your network infrastructure.
- Document network state. Ansible Automation Platform can retrieve information about configuration and state across routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, and other IT infrastructure—from vendors like Cisco, Cisco Meraki, Arista Networks, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, F5 Networks, and Aruba—to create dynamic documentation of your network in a read-only manner.
- Audit network compliance. With Ansible Automation Platform, you can audit compliance of your critical infrastructure on a schedule or on demand. If an audit fails, Event-Driven Ansible can automatically issue notifications and run remediation tasks to restore compliance and minimize potential threats.
- Detect configuration drift. Using your defined network configuration policies, Event-Driven Ansible can detect and remediate configuration drift across a range of network infrastructure like software-defined networking (SDN) controllers, management systems, firewalls, load balancers, and more for more consistent, reliable network operations.
2. Manage network configurations
Modern infrastructure as code (IaC) approaches like GitOps let you operate networks in a programmatic, repeatable, and consistent way. With standardized configurations based on industry and organization best practices, IaC approaches simplify network management, streamline operations, and improve the reliability and performance of critical services.
- Automate standardized configurations. Ansible Automation Platform lets you define and deploy standardized network configurations without complex code or templates. Resource modules and simple native data models help you configure common technologies—like virtual local area networks (VLANs) and access control lists (ACLs)—and automate more complex functions. You can also enforce configuration policies and best practices to ensure consistency across your network.
- Adopt a centralized source of truth. Repositories of accurate network information, sources of truth like GitHub and GitLab simplify and speed network configuration and management as part of IaC approaches. Native webhooks in Ansible Automation Platform let you integrate network infrastructure with sources of truth and adopt GitOps approaches for network automation. And with a common data model across network operating systems, you can deploy automated pipelines to speed network configuration.
3. Streamline network operations
Network automation reduces manual, time-consuming processes to minimizes the risk of errors. Automating routine tasks lets you focus on critical network design and troubleshooting activities to improve network performance and reliability. With automated network operations, you can achieve faster response times, improve service delivery, and increase the resiliency of your critical infrastructure.
- Perform upgrades at scale. With Ansible Automation Platform, you can automate upgrades, updates, and patching of complete networks—including SDN controllers and network devices—at scale. Flexible workflows let you define comprehensive upgrade processes that include tasks like opening tickets in IT service management (ITSM) systems like ServiceNow, sending notifications, gathering operational states, checking dependencies, and transferring binary files. Automated validation checks help ensure that networks remain stable throughout the process. Detailed logging and reporting provide visibility into each upgrade step, simplifying troubleshooting and compliance auditing. And because your upgrade processes execute consistently, you can efficiently deploy the latest security and performance enhancements to reduce vulnerabilities and improve network reliability.
- Mitigate outage impacts. Event-Driven Ansible lets you respond in a predetermined way to events and conditions observed by your network monitoring, management, and observability solutions. Simply define if-then rules, event sources, and automated actions in Ansible Rulebooks, and the platform matches received events to the applicable rulebook, determines the appropriate action, and then performs that action. As a result, you can respond to critical network issues in less time and mitigate potential service disruptions. You can also automatically open service tickets, gather troubleshooting data, notify stakeholders, and remediate common conditions, all without manual intervention.
- Run network health checks. Ansible Automation Platform streamlines health checks across your network infrastructure. By automatically gathering, parsing, and validating the operational state of your network infrastructure, you can identify potential issues before they escalate into critical incidents. With flexible workflows and rollback capabilities, you can customize health checks to meet your requirements and integrate them with your existing operational workflows to reduce the risk of unexpected downtime. Comprehensive reports with detailed insights and useful data help you make informed decisions and address anomalies in less time.
Learn more about network automation with Red Hat
Read the Network automation guide to learn how you can expand automation across multivendor networks.
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