Automate Network Compliance and Service Assurance for Multi-Vendor Network Infrastructure

Many enterprise networks grew organically through M&A. Hence, it is very common to have multi-vendor infrastructure and multiple network automation tools for enterprises to grow. These network automation tools could not keep up with upgrades to the underlying infrastructure, thus, there are multiple manual processes introduced to ensure the network is up and running.

This practice usually results in islands of automation.

Quite often, the network automation tool is out-of-sync with the underlying device configurations. Every time a compliance report has to be generated, network operators have to perform a complex manual process to review and reconcile configurations for hundreds of network elements. Eventually, due to the high maintenance required, the automation tool is shelved and operators resort to excel sheets to track their change logs.

Anuta NCX Orchestrator uses a model-driven approach to ensure compliance for multi-vendor network infrastructure.

At the time of installation, NCX scans multi-vendor devices and discovers previously configured services using the admin defined YANG models. After NCX is deployed, it will provide a simple self-service portal so that operators can push the desired policies across multi-vendor infrastructure. So, NCX has the initial state of the entire network as well as the services that are configured.

Further, NCX periodically performs inventory job and validates the actual device configuration against the device state in NCX. If there is any discrepancy, NCX will generate an alarm. The administrator has two options to take corrective action.

• Option-1: Overwrite NCX
  This option updates the NCX state to include the current device configuration. Effectively, adding the out-of-band change to NCX state going forward.
• Option-2: Overwrite Device
  This option over writes the device configuration with the current state in NCX. This will undo any out-of-band changes made to the device.

The configuration reconciliation feature ensures that NCX state is always in-sync with the device configuration thus enabling Service Assurance.

Administrators can schedule periodic jobs to perform discovery and audit. Since the NCX state is in-sync with the devices all the time, admin can generate the compliance reports very quickly.

For more details, checkout NCX product page