NetOps?

I’ve been working professionally as a network / systems administrator for several years, and have found myself in a senior position.

My current role includes both server and network infrastructure responsibilities, and I have been adopting modern application development practices such as CI/CD and terraform to make the server side super-cool.

I’ve done my best to do this on the network side, but we have a very non-homogenous network so many automation tools have coverage gaps that prevent me implementing them. Ansible appears to be the best target at the moment, but I worry about the org cost of requiring all network operators to learn a new tool. Frameworks like NAPALM or *miko provide lots of functionality, but everything’s up to you as far as monitoring etc goes. eNMS appears to be the most coherent attempt to put all this together, but it’s so obtuse to configure I fear I’d be the only person using it.

“GitOps” is a very attractive goal for me, and getting all configuration into git has many cool extras that come with it. I’m looking for tools to further that goal, and simplify network device configuration into a common configuration language across vendors (as much as possible)

Do I need to abstract vendor differences for a specific task (add BGP route, create VLAN,etc), and add them to a traditional monitoring or deployment tool?

Or am I missing something? Is this landscape just not totally baked yet?

NetOps? Got a job offer recently for this kind of position, and that’s what they called it.