4 essential network automation use cases for everyone

Enterprise network topologies have become increasingly complex as organizations struggle to manage components from different vendors, maintain 24/7 network availability, and just generally do more with less. Reliance on manual management of your network is not just time-consuming and error prone–it can impact your network performance, security, and reliability, as well as drain resource hours to determine root cause analysis. For your business, that means potential disruption of business operations, lower team productivity, higher operational costs, and less agility. 

While network teams often worry about sacrificing control by using automation, the reality is that organizations who successfully adopt automation to manage their network operations are more compliant, expose fewer security attack surfaces, and experience higher network performance and reliability. Network administrators report more job satisfaction as they're able to resolve issues faster and are freed up to focus on more rewarding work.  

IDC found that enterprises using automation see a 38% increase in network management team efficiency. 

Let's explore a few foundational network automation tasks that every organization should be automating. For purposes of this blog, we'll demonstrate the automation of Cisco IOS devices, but this automation could easily be applied to Arista, Juniper or any other popular network devices supported by Red Hat's Ansible Content Collections.

We recommend the following four use cases because they:

• Deliver both business and technical value with relatively low risk to your network systems. See the interactive demo.
• Build a sequence of automation jobs that can be aggregated into a single seamless workflow for even greater efficiency.
• Expand and integrate with existing business critical ITSM systems, observability tools, as well as net-new AIOps workflows. 

Let's get started. 

Use case #1: Network fact gathering

One of the first things new automators do with their networks is to introspect their network estate. Why? Because it is a valuable low risk read-only activity, and it is the basis for creating dynamic documentation (use case 2) or evaluating for configuration drift.

Let’s use the network.ios.facts.facts module provided by the Cisco IOS certified collection to gather all the information on your IOS devices which can then be saved to the Git repository you create for your project. 

---
- name: Gather information from routers
  hosts: cisco
  gather_facts: yes
  tasks:
    - name: Gather router facts
      cisco.ios.ios_facts:
      register: cisco_facts
    - name: Display router facts
      ansible.builtin.debug:
        var: cisco_facts

Example Ansible Playbook for network fact gathering

Use case #2: Exporting network facts to a report or dynamic documentation

To help you simplify compliance and drift reporting, you can export your network data to a reporting tool such as Splunk, Grafana, etc., use a Jinja2 template to publish via HTML, or create a simple dynamic documentation / dashboard. 

Ready to get started with the network fact gathering and reporting cases? Log in to read our Solution Guide - Network Fact Gathering and Reporting. 

This will help you quickly and consistently make updates to your network in just minutes instead of days. You'll remove the errors common with manual configuration updates while consistently enforcing policies across devices. Network teams can be more efficient and productive as you improve your network reliability and security posture by keeping up with the latest network patches. 

Use case #3: Network backup

Backing up your network is a critical step before making any device configuration changes. It ensures you can recover from any network issues or changes can be quickly rolled back to the previous configuration state. 

Let’s write a playbook to back up your current network configuration and save it to the Git repository for your project. You can download the Ansible network.backup validated content collection and customize it for your specific environment. Then create a job template in Ansible Automation Platform using your network backup playbook project. Save your job template as Cisco network backup.

Example Ansible Playbook for network backup:

---
- name: Back up current Cisco IOS network configuration
  hosts: cisco
  tasks:
    - name: Back up current Cisco IOS network configuration
      cisco.ios.ios_config:
        backup: yes
      register: backup_output
    - name: Display backup location
      ansible.builtin.debug:
        msg: "Configuration backed up to {{ backup_output.backup_path }}"

Use case #4: Network configuration

Once you've compiled your network facts into a report and have run your network backup automation task, you're ready to make configuration changes. 

Using automation for network configuration allows you to consistently make updates to your network in just minutes instead of days. You'll remove the errors common with manual configuration updates while consistently enforcing policies across devices. Network teams can be more efficient and productive as you improve your network reliability and security posture by keeping up with the latest network patches.  

Refer to the Cisco IOS certified content collection for network configuration modules that are available for download from the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. Examples of common network configuration examples include:

• cisco.ios.ios_bgp_address_family: Configures and manages the attributes of BGP address family.
• cisco.ios.ios_bgp_global: Configures and manages the attributes of global BGP
• cisco.ios.ios_vlans: Configures VLANs
• cisco.ios.ios_acls: Configures and manages the named or numbered ACLs
• cisco.ios.ios_hostname: Provides declarative management of hostname
• cisco.ios.ios_interfaces: Manages the interface attributes.
• cisco.ios.ios_logging_global: Manages the logging attributes.
• Using any of the above modules, write a playbook to apply your network configurations and save to the Git repository for your project. Below is an example using the ios_bgp_address_family and ios_ios_vlans modules.

Example Ansible Playbook for network configuration:

---
- name: Network configuration update
  hosts: all
  tasks:
    - name: Configure BGP address
      cisco.ios.ios_bgp_address_family:
        config:
          as_number: 65000
          address_family:
            - afi: ipv4
              safi: unicast
              neighbors:
                - neighbor: 10.0.0.1
                  remote_as: 65001
                  activate: true
              networks:
                - prefix: 192.168.1.0
                  masklen: 24


    - name: Configure VLANs
      cisco.ios.ios_vlans:
        config:
          - name: Data
            vlan_id: 10
            state: active
          - name: Voice
            vlan_id: 20
            state: active
          - name: Management
            vlan_id: 99
            state: active
        state: merged

Next, create a job template for your project and save as Network configuration update, then select Launch to run the template.

Ready to get started with these network back up and configuration use cases? Read our Solution Guide - Network Backup and Configuration (login required). 

Explore advanced network automation use cases

As you expand your adoption of automation, the value and benefits actually increase while the amount of effort required to maintain your network decreases. 

Once you have tackled the basics of network fact gathering, compliance reporting, network backups, and basic configuration, you're ready to expand into more advanced forms of automation:

• Explore five great network automation use cases.
• Orchestrate existing network automation tasks into a seamless workflow.
• Integrate ITSM into your network workflows. Learn how Southwest Airlines tackled this use case.
• Implement event-driven NetOps levering your existing network observability and monitoring tools.
• Learn how to scale automation adoption across your organization.