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Workflow automation in ATOM accelerates complex methods of procedures (MOPs) such as software upgrades, configuration migrations, zero-touch provisioning, and pre-and post-checks. This article will review five of the latest enhancements to the ATOM platform intended to simplify the creation and management of multiple workflows.
1. Plug-and-Play Libraries
Anuta Networks ATOM contains 350+ libraries that are pre-built with a low-code architecture. Customers can drag and drop these elements onto a design canvas and connect them to develop complex MOPs within a few minutes. The libraries are intuitively described, and the catalog can be searched based on keywords such as BGP (protocol), Cisco IOS XE RPC (vendor/platform), Telemetry Collection (automation feature), notifications (ATOM software components), and more.
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, invoking compliance checks, creating dashboards, and more.
Anuta Networks will continue to add more libraries as part of the ATOM minor release cadence every three months. Custom RPCs can also be shared with customers as packages, and the ATOM user interface will also highlight the most frequently used libraries and pin them to the top of the dashboard for easy access.
As a result, these pre-built libraries dramatically reduce the effort involved in creating a variety of MOPs.
2. Open API Integration
Anuta Networks ATOM integrates with the modern software stack that supports Swagger, a specification for publishing REST APIs. As a result, ATOM can auto-discover APIs and add them to pre-built catalog entries.
Customers can also connect these libraries with the entirety of ATOM workflow constructs.
ATOM’s support for Swagger/Open APIs enables third-party software integration without any incremental developer effort.
ATOM has also been integrated with Atlassian, JIRA, Slack, Federos, ServiceNow, Terraform, Ansible, Gitlab, RackN, and Cisco NSO and validated in customer deployments. Anuta Networks ATOM’s support for open standards such as YANG/NETCONF, REST API, OpenAPI, BPMN, IETF NACM, CLI/SSH allows customers and partners to integrate ATOM with any 3rd party software of their choice quickly and easily.
3. Reporting for Customizable Workflows
Anuta Networks ATOM has always supported granular reporting for custom workflows. Now, network operators can double click into more detail and review both summaries and granular details for each phase of a workflow.
For example, if a workflow involves 15 steps, the ATOM report provides the specific details of each step, its duration, execution status, and whether it matches the expected SLAs. Without such visibility, operators find it extremely difficult to manage thousands of workflows. Furthermore, business owners can’t justify the investment in workflow automation.
Network operators can also create custom views by applying filters such as location, tenant, group, date, and more and pin these views to the dashboard.
The ATOM summary views include historical (daily, weekly, or monthly) trends of workflow execution status (Failed or Passed). These statistics are used to calculate MTTR, MTTF, MTTP, and more.
Furthermore, network operators have visibility to a summary of pending, failed, canceled, or completed workflow instances, including user actions and associated time logs. This eliminates the need to open the actual workflow to track the progress or determine what’s happening in the workflow since ATOM provides a detailed report.
ATOM customers can also use the advanced reporting functionality to solve the challenge of managing thousands of Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) workflows for onboarding 5G cell sites.
The combination of an intuitive policy builder, powerful run-time engine, and a granular reporting interface makes Anuta Networks ATOM the most powerful workflow automation platform on the planet.
4. Predictive Analytics (AIOps) for Workflow Completion
As Anuta Networks ATOM executes hundreds of workflows, it also collects many metrics and generates valuable insights such as:
- The average duration for individual process definitions or use-cases,
- Average time spent on a specific task of a particular workflow,
- Identification of the longest-running task in a process instance,
- Time spent on user tasks,
- Analysis of instances executed during a specific period and subsequent creation of a trend chart.
Furthermore, ATOM includes AI/ML capabilities that can predict the estimated time of a workflow completion based on the region, location, past data, and more.
One of Anuta Networks’ customers has deployed hundreds of 5G cell sites utilizing a real-time status tracker, similar to the Domino’s pizza tracker, to monitor the progress of ZTP workflows. It is now able to predict how long a cell site should take for onboarding. In case of any delay, the ZTP workflow automatically opens a ticket in JIRA for the operator to intervene.
5. Anomaly and Outlier Detection
Anuta Networks ATOM leverages anomaly detection and outlier detection to improve workflow executions. Let’s take a deeper look at these two close but different capabilities.
Anomaly Detection
Some of the most valuable monitoring metrics are also the most variable. Application throughput, web requests, user logins, CPU utilization, and memory utilization are all critical, top-level metrics that tend to have pronounced peaks and valleys based on the time of day or the day of the week. Consequently, these fluctuations make it very hard to set sensible thresholds for alerting or investigation.
By analyzing a metric’s historical behavior, anomaly detection distinguishes between normal and abnormal metric trends.
For example, a throughput metric peaks during business hours each weekday, when application usage is highest, drops to a local minimum at night, and falls to a prolonged lull on the weekend. Because that pattern repeats week after week, the anomaly detection algorithm can accurately forecast the metric’s value, peaks, and lulls. Plummeting throughput is a severe issue, but it’s often impossible to set threshold alerts to identify its occurrence.
Anomaly detection can address the challenge by separating the trend component from the seasonal component of a time series to track metrics that are trending steadily upward or downward.
Anuta Networks ATOM analyzes the historical trends for workflow execution times, detects anomalies, and provides the necessary context to the workflow developer for further investigation.
Outlier Detection
For many metrics, it is a nontrivial exercise to pre-define what constitutes “normal” versus “abnormal” values – especially for metrics whose baseline value fluctuates over time. Outlier detection can be used in these instances to trigger an alert when a workflow starts reporting errors at an abnormal rate. Network operators can also quickly identify whether delays are attributable to a slow region or team without having to choose a fixed threshold for what constitutes “anomalous” metrics.
Anuta Networks ATOM also runs a statistical analysis in real-time on all workflows to determine the baseline and assess whether any workflows deviate significantly from that baseline.
For example, when the same ATOM ZTP workflow is executed in multiple regions to onboard cell-site routers, as mentioned in the previous example, ATOM can detect the regions, cities, and locations where the onboarding process is particularly delayed. The issue may be due to a slow network, lack of computing resources, or other challenges. To address an issue, ATOM can identify either resource-heavy or time-consuming sub-workflows and make recommendations for further optimization.
Business Benefits with Workflow Automation
Workflow automation accelerates complex MOPs, eliminates manual errors, increases IT staff productivity, and reduces overall operating expenses. As an example, one of Anuta Networks’ customers, a large media entertainment company, achieved a 35x boost in productivity.
Before deploying ATOM, the company was expending over one and a half hours to migrate configurations to IPv6 manually. After deploying ATOM, it was able to complete the same migrations within five minutes.
Workflow Integration with other ATOM Functions
The Anuta Networks ATOM workflow automation complements the rest of ATOM’s core capabilities to deliver a complete, seamless, low-code experience while unlocking innovative use-cases.
Some of the top integrations with other modules in ATOM include:
- Configuration Management – Network operators can label configuration snapshots that can be used throughout the definition of workflows. This integration is beneficial for device RMA and automated configuration restorations.
- Compliance Management – A workflow can trigger a compliance check to detect any out-of-band changes. Similarly, if the compliance module detects a violation, it can trigger the workflow to open a ticket in the ITSM tool. This integration avoids costly outages and mitigates security vulnerabilities due to manual or accidental changes to configurations.
- Service Orchestration – Workflows can run pre-and post-checks supporting the service orchestration of L2/L3 VPN, EVPN, and more. This integration ensures that the service matches the SLAs before handoff to the end customer.
- Closed-Loop Automation – When ATOM receives alerts (e.g., SNMP Traps, Syslogs), it will trigger a workflow to capture diagnostics and attach them to a ticket in the ITSM tool. The workflow can also invoke remediation actions such as shutting down interfaces, BGP neighbors, applying ACLs and QoS policing policies, and more. This integration accelerates MTTR and avoids blind spots in network operations.
Workflow at Scale
Anuta Networks ATOM has a cloud-native, containerized, microservices architecture that scales horizontally to run thousands of workflows within just hours. For more details, visit: Massive Scale Workflow Automation
Summary
Anuta Networks ATOM’s powerful cloud-native workflow automation platform eliminates manual operations for complex MOPs, boosts productivity, and delivers granular and summary reports to track workflow progress. These superpowers make it one of the most powerful platforms of its kind.
To learn more, visit: Anuta ATOM Network Automation Workflow
