Prevent These 5 Outages with No-Code Network Automation

1. Configuration Drift

You have a silent saboteur in your network: configuration drift.

Your perfectly laid-out network designs deliver the apps and services your business needs, but you suffer a mystery outage. Network devices are healthy, but someone deployed a non-standard configuration.

Your “golden” templates of ACLs, QoS, and routes can be totally undermined with a simple typo. What can we do?

The first step is to digitize your network designs and make them available as shareable, enforceable automation. Continually document your topologies, rules, policies, and configurations as Network Intents, the no-code building block of NetBrain automation.

The second step is to run your Intent automation continually as anti-drift assessments. Set it and forget it, until NetBrain alerts you to inconsistencies as they arise. Address the potential drift fallout before an outage can occur.

2. Human Error

They say “to err is human”. Last I checked, most IT teams are exclusively composed of human beings. So how do we eliminate the 50% of outages caused by human error?

Let the fully automated member of your team, NetBrain, assess the network early and often. Errors are unavoidable, but proactive audits catch human errors early, avoiding the snowball into downtime.

Implement a “triple defense” of automation around any planned changes to your network.

• Before your change window, validate the health of your entire network to avoid red flags that might compromise the success of your proposed change. Don’t introduce changes to a network already under duress.
• During your change window, execute your new configuration designs as automation to do away with the dreaded “fat finger”. No more typos, no partial cut-and-pastes. After automated your verifications and run an assessment of your entire network again as an impact analysis of your change. Catch any unintended side-effects and (automatically) rollback, if necessary.
• After your change window, add your change verifications to your Automation Library and schedule them to constantly ensure your new design/deployment is always performing and free from configuration drift.

For unplanned changes, configuration errors, and design drift, automate continuous assessments of your network designs, best practices, and company standards to catch mistakes with a simple glance of your assessment dashboard.

3. Security Breaches

Why are security breaches still a thing? We know about malicious actors and study their methods. We prep and implement security measures to stop them in their tracks. So why are they more common than ever?

Time. A hacker’s best weapon.

Networks are meant to be agile. Growth and changes are introduced quickly and daily. With enough time, your security precautions will fall out of spec, out of compliance, and out of date. Network security is not a task; it’s a continuous habit.

Breaches exploit the gap between your best-laid plans and their continued implementation. Remove the gap with NetBrain automation.

• Capture your network security policies, practices, and templates as no-code automation. Continually verify their implementation across every device, border edge, and zone in your network. Don’t suffer breaches because of drift or error.
• Be alerted to new threats as they emerge. Integrate NetBrain with your vendors’ support portals like Cisco SmartNet Total Care and get immediate alerts whenever new CVEs leave your infrastructure vulnerable. Assess even for end-of-life and end-of-support hardware and software. Don’t get caught with your guard down and prepare an immediate response.
• When a breach does occur, identify the blast radius immediately. NetBrain maps the entire affected area and diagnoses every network device exposed so you can close any security holes.

4. Failover Failures

Your network is resilient. You load-balance across multiple sites. You double down on first hops, links, and servers. Everything has a backup. There’s no single point of failure in your network!

Then you get a call at 3 AM that “Region 2 Datacenter” went offline and services are down.

Failover should have kicked in, but… didn’t. Why?! Maybe an ACL on the standby firewall wasn’t updated? Maybe the sync port between an HA pair went down a few days ago? Could be someone fat-fingered the HSRP group ID? It happens!

Acknowledge it, and plan for it! Analyze your network’s redundancy using NetBrain the same way it checks for drift, human error, and security vulnerability. Continuously verify for fault tolerance, identify single points of failure, and enforce compliance with your best HA designs.

It’s easy to codify your failover implementation in NetBrain without actual coding needed. Memorialize the designs and configurations with the no-code graphical interface and set them to run for continuous enforcement.

5. Lack of Network Visibility

We’ve all suffered through this. What do we have in the network? How is it performing? Who’s keeping up with our inventory? Do any of our devices have expiring vendor support?

Blind spots in our network are not just frustrating administratively, they cause and prolong outages. So shine a light on even the dark corners of your infrastructure.

• Dynamically map the problem areas of your network in real-time during an incident. Eliminate the wasted time reverse engineering your network before an incident can be addressed.
• Gather device metrics like CPU, memory, QoS, and link utilization, with automated diagnoses run during a network event or continually to prevent them.
• Translate that data with intelligent assessments into actionable insights to remediate any issue before they become prolonged outages.

Stop Outages Before They Start

All outages have a root cause. Why wait for service disruptions to address them? Empower yourself to proactively assess and respond to potential network issues. Let the machine QA the network and free yourself to focus on growing and evolving your infrastructure. That’s the promise of outage prevention with NetBrain.