The Value of Network Intent

Intents are the business outcomes needed by an organization translated into network infrastructure conditions IT must deliver. Intents unify IT by providing a single place to perform service management. As more operation teams use more intents, the value increases, and you address more business needs.

01

Intent-Based Automation (IBA) Scales Fast

Manage your hybrid network with Intents—policies, paths, and configurations—crucial to your business and validate their compliance and performance. IBA captures network actions (ACLs, route comparisons, path failovers, etc.) and stores them as network Intents without scripting or programming. Then replicate Intents across your entire network using templates and cloning technology.

02

IBA is No-code

Record and store skilled engineers’ diagnostic steps without writing code. Visual parsing unlocks no-code programmability on complex network problems. Enables network engineers familiar with visual parsing to parse configuration files and CLI command output and SNMP output for automation problem resolutions.

03

A Digital Twin is Foundational

A mathematical model of the hybrid network is essential to maintaining a real-time understanding of the network and its traffic. It forms the basis for automation, remediation, and real-time dynamic mapping of the network without straining network resources. To guarantee timely analysis of network conditions, it’s updated as soon as network conditions change to ensure the success of an Intent-based automation system.

04

Hybrid-Cloud Visibility

Visibility must be borderless, extending from traditional, on-prem infrastructure to SDN, SD-WAN, virtual, and public cloud for true end-to-end visual management. Display real-time configuration, topology, and condition of the network in dynamic, on-demand maps. Then, automate diagnostics using Intents right on any map or path. Export dynamic maps to Microsoft Visio or Word.

05

Preventive Automation

Proactively prevent downtime due to design and security issues, performance degradation, configuration drift and human error by automating the continuous verification and enforcement of your network intents. The power of an early warning detection system provides continuous enforcement of the network in support of business requirements.

06

Triggered Automation

Provides the ability to capture transient issues the moment they occur to left-shift initial diagnostic steps to the machine before any operator begins troubleshooting. Event-triggered automation begins diagnosing issues reported via your ITSM or NMS tool allowing less technical staff to solve more problems during first response.

07

Interactive Automation

Diagnose and perform individual tasks interactively when your subject-matter experts need to troubleshoot any issue. Spend more time resolving issues instead of running mundane preliminary steps. An interactive console provides dynamic real-time mapping technology, and bi-directional real-time path and path intent verifications. As engineers troubleshoot, NetBrain intelligently records their diagnostic steps to create new shared automation.

08

Intent-Based Automation Center

Intent-Based Automation Center service provides a continuously expanding center of pre-built expertise-based automation units ready to use right out of the box. These automation units address the most common scenarios seen in most enterprises for an event-driven response, such as those reported via a network helpdesk service ticket), as well as for proactive design-level compliance, security, and application performance support verifications.

09

Reports and Dashboard

Customizable reports provide crucial automation and diagnostic summaries in a single GUI. View results for a specific problem or a network change to analyze user activity, tasks, and incident status. Dashboards allow managers to look at thousands of network intents in a single place to glean what’s important and see network automation trends.

10

Multi-Vendor

Empowers enterprises by capturing their existing multi-vendor mix of physical, virtual, software-defined, and cloud technologies and network operation’s best practices and allows them to be visualized, diagnosed, and automated at scale.