Network automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Manage all of your existing networking gear—including switches, routers, load balancers, and firewalls—with a single, unified platform. Reuse network CLI commands you already know and start automating easily across a wide range of networking platforms.

Software Defined Network (SDN) controllers can manage specific networking domains, but what if you have multiple SDN platforms? Ansible Automation Platform can “manage the managers” and use the same automation language across multiple network domains.

Build NetOps processes on trusted telemetry and automate routine tasks to free time for innovation. Use event-driven automation to perform targeted maintenance, limit outages, quickly address security risks, refresh service tickets, enforce standard configurations, and perform backups.

Automatically update the “source of truth” repository and configure network devices consistently. Complete work quickly and enforce configuration policies. Backup and restore devices from multiple vendors using a single automation platform.

Automate and integrate inventory systems, IP Address Management (IPAM) tools, GitHub repositories, and “source of truth” solutions. Retrieve and store device configurations and push trusted configurations to your network. Automatically collect network facts to inform preventive maintenance.

Codify operational knowledge and domain expertise into automation projects so that your entire team—regardless of skill level—can manage your day-to-day network operations for optimal consistency and accuracy. Automate high-volume tasks to improve overall efficiency and free time for other priorities. 

Build workflows to automate entire operational processes, with any number of Ansible Playbooks, updates, or other workflows—regardless of whether they use different inventories or run across different users. This makes it easier to automate across complex processes and multiple network and IT teams.

Consistently deploy remote sites, extending security controls and policies from the datacenter, across clouds, to edge locations. Use Event-Driven Ansible to automate compliance audits, the configuration of dependencies to support endpoint applications, and remediation actions.

Manage any network size or layout with a scalable automation solution that includes automation mesh to package dependencies and bring automation closer to its targets. Add resiliency, execution capacity, and flexibility to scale your automation across multivendor environments.

Update configuration databases, manage tickets, and enable closed-loop responses to IT Service Management (ITSM) tasks with the Ansible Certified Content Collection for ServiceNow ITSM. Use Event-Driven Ansible to automate ITSM processes and integrate with authentication and authorization systems. 

Securely log network and automation activity, with audit trails to document who ran the activity, how it was customized, and which resources were changed. Store this data securely and export it for further analysis or external logging to supported tools such as Splunk, Loggly, Sumologic, and Elastic Stack.

Manage your network using trusted content built on best practices and experience. Ansible Automation Platform offers certified and validated automation content for multivendor networks and security solutions. You can also use content signing capabilities for compliance and other needs.

With help from Red Hat, ANZ New Zealand reduced the time required for end-to-end DNS provisioning from six days to five minutes, a time savings of 99.4%.

ProRail expanded its use of Ansible Automation Platform to accelerate network operations and move toward an integrated, end-to-end automation approach to IT processes.