Most network management tools provide a way to group devices and interfaces based on a variety of information, including descriptions, addresses, and names. I've been thinking about how to use the descriptions in both devices and interfaces to enable the automatic grouping mechanisms to help manage...

I've written in this blog about various reasons for using network automation but it is time to put them together. Counting down… 7. Performance and SLAs The first thing that network management does is performance monitoring. It's conceptually easy, but surprisingly challenging, primarily...

You have a lot of switches and routers, more than you care to count. The IOS in each of them is now old and needs updating. You're not looking forward to handling each one with a manual process. What are your options? Well, if you did five of them a day, you could do 25 per week. Ten a day would...

I'm a proponent of network management automation and found a related blog post, Why End Users Love BPM , by long-time friend Scott Menter, who is working at BP Logix. BP Logix makes products for automating business processes. Scott's post discusses what happens when people are forced to run errands...