Wrap-up
What started as a fire drill turned into a blueprint for resilient, automated operations.
You didn’t just fix a broken router, you:
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Established a standard configuration as code
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Enabled a real-time event stream with model-driven telemetry
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Built an event-driven automation pipeline that turns reactive work into proactive response
With these tools in place, your infrastructure is no longer fragile and reactive. It’s self-healing, policy-driven, and (perhaps most importantly) much less likely to wake you up in the middle of the night.
What’s next?
There are many possible ways to use this technology that we didn’t cover, such as:
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Monitoring switch ports instead of router interfaces
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Automatic triage of network conditions when an issue is detected, and putting the results in a ticket
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Checking availability of downstream resources to determine issue severity
Consider what you commonly see in your environment. You may want to use the lab environment to explore the possibilities.
Other network platforms
This lab was on Cisco IOS-XE, but that’s not the only network platform where this is possible.
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Cisco NX-OS can use the same technology stack that we used in this lab. You can use YANG for the data source, but NX-API and DME are also available. There’s even a dedicated module to configure telemetry:
cisco.nxos.nxos_telemetry -
Arista EOS can be polled by Telegraf over gNMI. An example can be found here.
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If you have an existing network monitoring tool such as Dynatrace or ThousandEyes, you may be able to plug it into Event-Driven Ansible