Network Intent

The Power of No-Code Network Intents

Every network outage, misconfiguration, or performance hiccup leaves behind a valuable lesson—a rule that should have been true to prevent it. These golden rules, along with their verification logic, are what we call network intents.

What Exactly Are Intents?

Intents are self-enforcing network truths—coded versions of your team’s network expertise. They contain a baseline truth and the logic to check it. Network intents codify your operational knowledge into enforceable rules that automatically propagate across your infrastructure – when you solve one problem, the system learns the underlying principle and proactively checks all other devices for similar vulnerabilities, preventing repeat incidents at scale. 

For example:

• “All redundant links must maintain balanced load under normal conditions.”
• “No device should ever have a known vulnerable firmware version.”
• “BGP sessions must automatically failover within 30 seconds of disruption.”

Intents are automated through continuous assessments to proactively enforce all aspects of the network as “this must always be right.”

Intent-Based Automation

Intents are the fabric of network automation. Harness Intents in troubleshooting, change, and assessment workflows to keep your network in check.

How Intents Transform Your Network

1. From Reactive to Proactive
   Instead of waiting for outages, automation continuously assesses: “Is this intent still true everywhere?”
2. Institutionalized Expertise
   When your senior engineer solves a tricky OSPF issue, that solution becomes an intent that automatically protects every applicable router.
3. Automatic Scaling of Knowledge
   A lesson learned in one corner of your network becomes protection for all similar devices—globally and instantly.

Real-World Intent Magic

Imagine:

• Last month’s fiber cut taught you that “maintaining QoS path intents” matters
• Today, automation finds 3 other critical links violating that intent in other parts of your network
• Intents ensure those issues get fixed—before they cause your next major outage

• Real-Time Assessment: Continually assess any network component to verify specific operating conditions or status.
• Expert Diagnosis: Codify and automate the diagnostic steps taken by your network experts during troubleshooting, change, and assessments.
• Human-Level Logic: Apply logic to real-time, historical, and baseline network conditions to determine the success or failure of your intended outcomes.
• Scalable Automation: Replicate and reuse throughout the NetBrain platform and across your network for preventing outages, faster troubleshooting, and safer network changes.
• Multi-Vendor Device Support: Supports any traditional or virtual device from any vendor through its native command interface.

Top Network Intents from Users

The Network Intents below are just a few of the top reported uses of NetBrain No-Code Automation applied to real-world customer infrastructures.