Managing the network manually is no longer humanly possible as networks continue to grow in complexity and size. Nowadays, end-to-end visualization has become a “must-have” for modern network teams, but businesses can’t get that kind of insight with static maps. Automation is really the only solution to enable network teams to handle increasingly critical workflows like network documentation, troubleshooting, security, and change management.
Taking simple automation one step further, NetBrain, the market leader for network automation, delivers the capability to integrate the platform into an organization’s existing tools and workflows through adaptive automation.
SourceForge recently caught up with Grant Ho, Senior Vice President at NetBrain, to talk about the differences between an autonomous and adaptive network and discuss the advantages of using adaptive network automation. Ho also offers some insights to overcome operational challenges in network management and shares some expert advice to help enterprises and network providers successfully move toward the adaptive network.
Q: Can you please share with us a brief overview of NetBrain (year founded, size, solutions, customers etc.)? Who are the brains behind the company?
A: NetBrain Technologies was founded in 2004 with a mission to simplify network management. The company was founded by Lingping Gao, former Chief Network Architect at Thomson Financial, where he managed the complexities of large enterprise networks and experienced the challenges of maintaining network performance.
NetBrain’s adaptive network automation platform provides network engineers
Grant Ho, Senior Vice President at NetBrain
with dynamic visibility across their hybrid networks and automation for key tasks across their IT workflows. Today, more than 2,000 of the world’s largest enterprises and managed service providers use NetBrain to automate network documentation, accelerate troubleshooting and strengthen network security—while integrating with a rich ecosystem of partners. NetBrain is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, with offices in Sacramento, California; London, United Kingdom; Munich, Germany; Toronto, Canada; and Beijing, China.
Q: Who are NetBrain’s customers and what segments do you serve?
A: Today, NetBrain serves more than 2,000 enterprise customers including more than one-third of Fortune 100 companies. NetBrain customers come from a variety of industries. These include technology and MSPs, healthcare, financial services, retail, network consultants, education, federal government and state and local government, to name a few. Our adaptive network automation platform helps network teams gain end-to-end visibility and improve efficiency and collaboration across their IT workflows.
Q: What are the key pain points that NetBrain seek to address?
NetBrain solves various problems when it comes to the day-to-day operations of network engineers. These include:
- Network documentation. Documenting the network continues to be a pain for many engineering teams because it’s a manual (e.g., done through Microsoft Visio), time-consuming, and error-prone process. Moreover, with constant network changes, it can be difficult to keep network diagrams updated. With NetBrain, organizations, can automatically document their networks and keep their network diagrams up-to-date through the power of our Dynamic Maps technology.
- Network troubleshooting. Like manual network documentation, today’s network troubleshooting is also a very manual process. It involves hopping around in the command-line interface (CLI) and oftentimes, using disparate, non-connected tools and consoles. Even worse, many times, network troubleshooting problems cannot be easily reproduced, so it’s nearly impossible to get to the root cause of a network outage. NetBrain solves this by enabling network teams to integrate real-time visibility and automation (through our Executable Runbook technology) within a troubleshooting workflow, thereby reducing manual work and improving mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). This includes integrations with solutions like ServiceNow, Splunk, and dozens of other network monitoring, ticketing, and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions through REST APIs.
- Network change management. Network changes are always fraught with fear. Gartner estimates that 50 percent of network outages are the result of changes, largely because the change to network devices is done manually through a combination of the CLI, which often leads to errors. Through NetBrain’s Change Management solution, engineers can automatically define their changes, push them out, and visualize the impact of their changes, thereby reducing the risk of human error and self-inflicted outages.
- Network security and defense. When it comes to defending the network, speed is of the essence. For instance, after a malicious party has attacked your network, teams often struggle to rapidly understand the source of the attack, the impact radius of the attack, and how to prevent future attacks (also called network hardening). Either it’s hard to get to the root cause or the real-time data just simply isn’t there. With NetBrain, every security event will now have a Dynamic Map and Executable Runbook associated with it, enabling automatic visibility and a path for change remediation.
- IT collaboration. Silos across IT teams continue to be pervasive across enterprises. For instance, when there’s a slow application, a typical first response is, “it must be the network.” Whether it’s the application, security, or network team, the degree of finger-pointing is a direct result of knowledge islands and lack of processes and systems that foster collaboration. NetBrain helps teams improve cross-IT collaboration by providing a common visibility framework during troubleshooting and security, and more importantly, enabling teams to codify and share their best practices with others.
Q: In networking, we often hear the words autonomous and adaptive. Could you explain to us in the simplest terms the difference between an autonomous network and an adaptive network? And why is automation a critical component of the adaptive network?
A: Put simply, an autonomous network is an idea that a network can run with minimal to no human intervention at all and is able to configure, monitor and maintain itself independently. We’re probably far off from actually seeing this concept alive and working within typical network environments, given that an estimated 95 percent of network operations are still done manually.
Adaptive network automation, on the other hand, is a concept where the benefit of automation is deeply flexible by adapting or working across an enterprise’s hybrid, multi-vendor network, its existing set of IT tools and know-how from engineering teams. This is critical because it dramatically up-levels the value that automation can provide today.
For instance, today’s network automation use cases are focused on provisioning, where network teams need to program separate automation scripts depending on specific vendor requirements. Moreover, as engineers learn more about how to troubleshoot network issues, there’s often no easy way to codify and share that knowledge with others. That’s where NetBrain’s adaptive network automation comes in. It helps network teams gain the benefits of automation, specifically by working across any network, integrating with any IT toolset (e.g., ServiceNow, Splunk, etc.) and incorporating the learnings that engineers gain every day.
Q: Let’s talk more about adaptive network automation. What is it exactly and how does it work?
A: Even though over 50 percent of network management tasks are repetitive, fewer than 5 percent are automated. The reason most everyday tasks remain manual is because until recently, automation wasn’t able to adapt to the complexities of workflows and tools that network teams have in their toolboxes. For example, scripts don’t scale across multi-vendor hybrid networks, simple automation doesn’t “talk” with existing network tools and given that most network engineers aren’t programmed easily, the know-how for specific tasks can’t be programmed easily—so scripting is a challenge.
Adaptive network automation helps tackle these issues by adapting to an enterprise’s network, tools, and knowledge. This is the heart of NetBrain’s value. First, NetBrain automatically discovers and decodes your multi-vendor infrastructures, collecting thousands of data points to build a “digital twin” of your network. Second, it integrates data from multiple sources like ServiceNow, Splunk, and other network monitoring, ticketing, and SIEM solutions. Finally, engineers can codify their best-practices—for instance, troubleshooting steps—without scripting, which can be added to the NetBrain database. All this information—the network, tools, and know-how—are represented in a rich Dynamic Map that lets engineers interact with their networks every day. It is through this map that engineers can then build and execute power automation procedures, through Executable Runbooks, for virtually any task when it comes to network documentation, troubleshooting, security, and other workflows.
Q: How is NetBrain’s adaptive network automation platform unique from other solutions in the market?
A: There are a few challenges with existing network automation solutions in the market. First, many of them are geared largely toward Day 0/1 activities like initial provisioning and setup; they don’t focus on Day 2+ ongoing operational work that network engineers spend a lot of their time on. That includes areas like network documentation, troubleshooting, security, and change management. Automating these day-to-day network tasks, which are typically part of complex IT workflows, is where NetBrain really shines.
Secondly, many of today’s automation solutions require engineers to write scripts and/or programs, which is not typically in the engineer’s wheelhouse. Moreover, the scripts they write typically require specific vendor knowledge, which makes it both difficult and impractical to enable automation across a hybrid, multi-vendor network. NetBrain’s platform helps abstract away these complexities by allowing engineers to easily write the tasks they want to automate, in a GUI environment, which can then be applied across the entire hybrid network. This “write once, execute everywhere” philosophy is another enabler that sets NetBrain’s automation apart from the pack.
Q: As the market leader for network automation, what advice can you give to businesses who have yet jump on the bandwagon and take advantage of the benefits of adaptive network automation?
A: Start now. According to a poll taken at Gartner’s 2017 Data Center Summit, network automation solutions were cited as the most strategic networking investments that organizations will make in the coming years. This is driven by broader technology trends like software-defined everything and intent-based networking, which is accelerating network automation initiatives across the data center, WAN and public cloud, to top CIO priorities around IT delivering greater agility to the business and fostering more collaboration across disparate IT teams. Moreover, for the network engineers, the ability to do their day-to-day jobs more efficiently—whether it’s resolving outages faster, making more accurate network changes, or training peers on new network technologies—will allow them to save time and work on more strategic projects. These trends will only accelerate in the future, and the need for adaptive network automation has never been greater.
About NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies is the market leader for network automation, providing network engineers with dynamic visibility across hybrid networks and automation for key tasks across IT workflows. The company specializes in network discovery, network security, network troubleshooting, network change management, network automation, SDN management, network documentation, and more.