Re: How much do you automate your automation?

TL;DR; Some organizations have full copy/versions of their stack in
offline mode for testing. e.g. https://docs.gns3.com/docs/

There are many slices of the pie.....mmmm pie....

* Known good systems/devices
* Known legacy systems/devices
* Unknown systems/devices
* 3rdparty systems/devices
* (other slices here)

1. To automate the automation of your systems you need to understand
that some systems from all slices will have a no-change verbal rule
set based on an existing long term ticket with no resolution.
2. MOP/SOP/Playbooks should list the systems/devices that CAN be operated on.
3. A breakglass user or access method MUST exist. Some/many
styems/devices/teams DO NOT support breakglass.
4. (insert other deep thoughts)

On Tue, Apr 14, 2026 at 1:36 PM Jon Lewis via NANOG
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I've been told that at [some of] the largest networks, network engineers
> "never directly log into network devices".  This implies that all
> configuration changes made to and insights gleaned from the network gear
> are done via some form of automation.
>
> I assume it's commonplace to have/use Unix CLI tools for executing
> configuration changes.  I've written such things for the past couple of
> places I've worked so that we can literally copy&paste from a MOP to a
> shell session and have a change implemented.  Such tools become
> extremely handy when you want to make the same change on a few or a few
> hundred devices.
>
> What I'm wondering is, how common is it to take the next logical step and
> if you have a planned maintenance window to implement some simple change,
> do you have an engineer manually make that change, manually execute a
> script that implements the change, or use old-school automation (at) to
> schedule a date & time at which the script that implements the change will
> be run, and optionally have an engineer monitor that the change happened
> and had the intended results?
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>   Jon Lewis, MCP :)              |  I route
>   Blue Stream Fiber, Sr. Neteng  |  therefore you are
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