Introduction

The importance of automation

The time for change has arrived. Enterprise networks have outgrown and outpaced organizations’ abilities to effectively manage themselves using traditional tools. Historically, network management was manually gathering point-in-time information, from or making configuration changes to individual devices.

Networks are often designed using a configuration command-driven approach, as opposed to a data-driven approach. Staff manually execute commands at the CLI to gather information or perform changes. They often regather information to confirm the state of the network after changes are made.

The ongoing creation and maintenance of network documentation is also performed manually. Hours of effort are required to make changes, often involving the repetition of the same commands on different devices. Inevitably, troubleshooting is necessary because of errors made using the manual methodology. Network automation solves all these problems.