The Top 5 Network Support Tickets to Automate
What frustrates you the most about network support? Nothing feels better than playing detective on an obscure network issue and being the IT hero who resolves it. But too much...
About a year ago, I was a member of the Advanced Networking team at a regional ISP (Internet service provider)—a glamorous name for an elite strike force of networking rock stars known to troubleshoot first and ask questions later.
And yet, I remember one of my last tasks before an opportunity with NetBrain presented itself was to work with our reseller on our Cisco SmartNet renewal—a decidedly unglamorous job. And it’s not like I was the rookie member of the team left with the grunt work while our veterans chased glory: I was the Director!
Cisco SmartNet Without NetBrain
Support contract renewals is something we must all deal with. And with multimillion-dollar contracts, there are a lot of i’s to dot and t’s to cross. Every year, we had to pull together a list of all our devices and hardware modules with expiring SmartNet support. Why? Because our reseller would always present us with a quote that would invariably miss a couple dozen or so of our expiring Cisco equipment. Oversights that wouldn’t be noticed until one of those machines inevitably experienced problems, TAC would be called, and we’d be notified that the device wasn’t under SmartNet support. Boo.
I suppose it’s no surprise: one reseller and managed service provider, SHI, states that “82% of devices have incorrect locations listed making it difficult to keep track of devices not covered by service contracts”. Sounds about right.
Worse than that, we’d often find we paid for support for equipment no longer on our network. A particular problem occurs when we’d have to return, or RMA, equipment that came dead on arrival from the manufacturer. Cisco SmartNet is great support, and we’d get a replacement part within hours. But in our reseller’s system, the serial number for the old device wouldn’t be replaced with the serial number for the new device.
Research company, Gartner, found that “two in five IT leaders regret technology purchases due to unfavorable terms or overpriced fees” ¹. Every year, I’d be one of those two!
But our workaround wasn’t much better. We’d trade spreadsheets back and forth with our reseller hoping to square what we had on our network with what we were paying for. But after finalizing the renewal, we’d still miss around half a dozen Cisco devices. We had a lot of hardware and a non-existent inventory or asset management system.
The Spreadsheet Support Group
Back to last year, in my frustration, I scoured the Internet for ideas, for anything, that might help me in this miserable endeavor. I never did find anything that might help me in that moment, but one particular post on the Cisco subreddit stuck with me: “SmartNet Renewal/Spreadsheet Hell – Is there a better way?”
The subject line touched a nerve. I thought this might have the info I’m looking for. The poster laid out their problem. My exact experience was right there on the screen: the inaccurate quotes, the spreadsheets, the back and forth. I felt seen.
I eagerly jumped to the comments to read the ingenious solutions my fellow engineers came up with.
Instead, I saw a lot of the same exasperated sentiments. “Pretty much mirrors my experience” said one commenter. “It’s pure insanity” and “THIS!!” said others. I kept scrolling but comment after comment just reiterated the same frustration. Even resellers themselves chimed in: “As a VAR [value-added reseller] we struggle with this for the same reasons” and “I spent 3-4 weeks alone… it’s nuts”.
There is just no way to do this without a good inventory or asset management tool. Being at NetBrain now, I’m so glad our software acts as a great—dare I say, unmatched—live inventory tool.
NetBrain Auto-Discovery and Device Groups
NetBrain strives to transform our NetOps workflows, and its main focus is on automation to do just that. But the approach it takes to get there—100% visibility into the network, human intelligence captured through Intents, and continuous network assessments—just so happens to make it a great tool for a myriad of other use cases like configuration management (CMDB), change management (NCCM), and IP management (IPAM).
Its Auto-Discovery feature automatically scans your network for every network device in your infrastructure, on-prem or cloud, regardless of vendor. You can’t automate your network if you don’t know what you have. To too many, cloud is a black box. When 50% of all computing happens in the cloud (according to Uptime Institute’s June 2023 Annual Survey), you can’t ignore it or write it off. That’s why NetBrain makes it a point to show you your entire infrastructure.
As a consequence, NetBrain has the entire inventory of your online network. And it makes that inventory available to you, categorized and grouped by vendor, machine type, network function, and location in the network.
What I would have done to have NetBrain at my old job! I would have had a complete inventory to compare directly against the list of devices in my Cisco SmartNet portal. It’s the same for any other vendor support as well. But even after a year employed here, NetBrain still has surprises for me.
NetBrain Saves the Day
This week, I found myself on an email thread about a customer who desperately needs some way to correlate their Cisco SmartNet contract with what is actually on their network. Painful memories rushed back into my mind.
Their problem is even worse than my experience as they have their infrastructure spread over various contracts with different resellers because they bid out every project. They strongly suspect they may be overpaying for SmartNet support by millions of dollars.
“Is there any way NetBrain can help on this?”, they wonder. Yes! Of course! Just re-read what I wrote earlier.
But then, to my surprise, a NetBrain engineer responded to the inquiry with information unknown to me.
“Very common use case. We integrate with Cisco SNTC [SmartNet Total Care]. We actually worked with Cisco on this Integration. We have quite a few customers who use this to reconcile their entitlement and reduce their OPEX.”
Cisco SmartNet with NetBrain
Whoa, we integrate with Cisco SmartNet? I had to find out more, so I reached out directly to that engineer, and they explained that NetBrain overlays Cisco SmartNet information directly on NetBrain maps! You can export a report of every device and their contract status. And you can even define time-to-expire thresholds and be alerted by NetBrain when devices are set to lose coverage within that threshold!
This is amazing! This wasn’t even something I would think of doing. Visualizing support coverage on our network diagrams? That’s the sort of high-tech stuff we should have been working with at the “Advanced Networking” department.
But my current colleague didn’t stop there. They continued explaining that the Cisco SmartNet service also provides end-of-sale, end-of-support, and end-of-life information! Cisco even sends NetBrain information on software recommendations and bug vulnerabilities as well! All that can also be overlaid on our Dynamic Maps with 3rd-party data views.
My mind was blown. All of these were purely manual workflows for my network engineering teammates from a year ago. Hours and hours of manpower on administrative tasks. Dark times.
NetBrain is the light at the end of a tunnel we never should have entered.
This has been such a popular custom integration with some of our largest customers that now NetBrain has recently released it as part of our latest Intent-Based Network Assessment (IBNA) Library!
The IBNA Library is a collection of over 160 (and growing) built-in Intents and Dashboards that reflect all the most common or typical network assessment tasks and checks. It’s NetBrain’s way of encouraging our customers to transition to a continuous network assessment model for preventing outages and service disruptions.
And as part of that effort, Cisco SmartNet integration now comes with NetBrain right out of the box!
This would have been a revelation back in my NetOps days. Perhaps I should go back and drop a comment on that subreddit and guide those lost engineers out of their “spreadsheet hell”. They deserve to know.
¹ Smarter with Gartner, “7 Cost-Reduction Mistakes to Avoid”, 17 August 2022. https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/7-cost-reduction-mistakes-to-avoid