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Automation Made Easy with Anuta ATOM

Automation Made Easy with Anuta Networks ATOM

“Batteries not included” – remember how this one phrase generated a negative feeling during birthdays or the holidays? We live in a world of instant gratification. No one wants nor often has the time to go through a lengthy installation and configuration process to reap the benefits of a gift or investment. Instant gratification is also one of the main drivers of the rapid adoption of cloud-based services. Network automation software provides instant gratification and immediate benefit. The sooner one can deploy and show value in a business environment, the higher the chance of success for the overall project roll-out. ATOM Out of Box support achieves precisely that objective.

Keeping this core belief in mind, Anuta Networks has invested significant engineering resources to develop a collection of pre-built libraries of workflows, service models, compliance rules, and closed-loop automation policies in our ATOM network automation solution. These libraries are all based on open standards to ensure interoperability and our platform also supports multi-vendor infrastructure to ensure the easiest and most seamless deployment.

Anuta’s pre-built libraries also follow industry best practices and are optimized for performance, scale, and security. They require minimal customization, thus avoiding investments in learning or developing scripts and models to automate complex services and workflows. The out-of-box support goes far to reduce TCO and accelerates time to value. As Anuta continues to build new libraries, the ATOM platform continually delivers incremental value to any automation project.

ATOM Out of Box Device Support

ATOM has support for 150+ platforms from 45+ vendors. These include switches, routers, firewalls, VPN gateways, IPAM, ITSM Tools, VNF Managers, SDN Controllers, PCEP, analytics and assurance platforms, etc. It is the deepest and broadest support in the IT world for both enterprises and service providers.  

For the complete list, visit https://www.anutanetworks.com/managed-devices/.

New vendors and platforms can also be added within a few weeks since ATOM follows industry standard YANG models to configure and monitor the physical and virtual network infrastructure.

You can submit requests for new vendor or platform support here: https://www.anutanetworks.com/managed-devices/request-device-support/

ATOM Out of Box Services

ATOM’s service orchestration automates complex stateful services such as IP/MPLS VPN services, L2/L3 connectivity, application delivery, Data Center Interconnect, FWaaS, etc.

ATOM also has several built-in service models based on IETF and OpenConfig standards. The list includes L2 VPN, L3 VPN, EVPN, ELINE/ELAN, and VLAN/VXLAN, with many variations in BGP, OSPF, and static routing. Customers can deploy these services within a few clicks or using APIs. These models are validated on the leading PE and P routers such as Juniper MX, Cisco ASR, Nokia, etc.

The complete list can be viewed here by selecting “Service Orchestration” under “Type”: https://www.anutanetworks.com/pre-built-integrations/

Once deployed, ATOM monitors the service health and ensures performance by running Y1731 and RFC 2544 OAM specified functional audits.

Furthermore, customers or partners can easily customize the YANG-based service models for minor deviations. The YANG models can also be augmented with Python to add any required business logic. Thus, configuration, customization, and business logic implementation are just a few clicks away.

ATOM Out of Box Low-Code Workflows

Workflow automation in ATOM accelerates complex Methods of Procedures (MOPs) that span various network elements and software such as IPAM and ITSM tools. The integrated workflows eliminate manual hand-offs, accelerate operations, and improve consistency.

ATOM includes several pre-built workflows that can automate MOPs such as software upgrades, Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP), switch RMA, bulk configuration updates, pre-and-post checks for VPN services, etc. These workflows also follow best practices from each vendor, thus minimizing configuration errors. As the workflows follow BPMN, an open standard, they can be easily extended and customized to match specific environments. ATOM also eases workflow design through an intuitive, drag-n-drop interface.

ATOM also includes 350+ libraries that are pre-built with a low-code architecture. The catalog includes simple entries such as RPC calls for issuing show commands to routers or complex entries such as BGP alert correlation. The library also includes sophisticated capabilities such as collecting inventory, archiving configurations, running device diagnostics, reserving IP addresses in Infoblox, opening a ticket in ServiceNow, onboarding a VNF, creating dashboards, etc.

Anuta Networks will continue to add more libraries as part of the ATOM minor release cadence every three months. These pre-built libraries dramatically reduce the effort involved in creating a variety of MOPs.

The complete list can be viewed here by selecting “Workflow Automation” under “Type”: https://www.anutanetworks.com/pre-built-integrations/

ATOM Out of Box Compliance Rules

ATOM’s compliance management ensures standard configuration rules are enforced within a multi-vendor infrastructure environment. For example, ATOM runs regular audits to sanity check configurations for NTP, DHCP, CDP, LLDP, QoS, and VPN policies. Subsequently, ATOM generates a granular audit report for each device in case of deviations. Customers can then choose to remediate the compliance violations automatically during the maintenance window.

The compliance rules can be written using regular expressions to compare CLI, NETCONF, YANG, or XML configurations against expected values. ATOM also supports JINJA2 variables to achieve maximum flexibility in creating compliance rules.

ATOM has a pre-built collection of compliance rules for scenarios like verifying DNS, password encryption policies, service compliance, SNMP, and Banners, OSPF and BGP policies, ACLs, etc. These rules are saved in an industry-standard format such as JSON and can be easily extended by customers.

The complete list can be viewed here by selecting “Compliance Management” under “Type”: https://www.anutanetworks.com/pre-built-integrations/

ATOM Out of Box Closed-Loop Automation Policies

Closed-Loop Automation in ATOM automates remediation for known violations by integrating device inventory, alert management, compliance audit, service monitoring, and workflow automation.

The pre-built collection includes remediation for interface flaps, packet drops, BGP neighbor changes, CPU threshold breaches, ACL rule hits, ServiceNow integration, etc. These rules are based on a DSL model that can also be adapted to build additional rules.

The complete list can be viewed here by selecting “Closed Loop Automation” under “Type”:

 https://www.anutanetworks.com/pre-built-integrations/

Summary

The Anuta Networks ATOM platform delivers significant out-of-the-box functionality to accelerate any network automation deployment. These use-cases are based on open standards and optimized for performance and security. One can cover multiple use cases and build custom ones with minimal effort and time, thus freeing IT teams for more value-added activities.

Try them now by signing up for a trial version for ATOM Cloud.

You can also learn how to adapt these out of box use-cases by enrolling in the Trailblazer certification expert-level coursework.

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