How do you automate in your business?

Hi -

We are looking to automate some elements relating to the provision of new services into our data centre. currently it is very very manual.

I have been experimenting with the UCS XML API on the UCS-PE and seem to have a pretty good grasp on it now, I cant see myself having any issues with problematically deploying elements into UCS for new services - however my question relates to end to end workflow of the overall process.

Let take a new vlan deployment for example...

We plan to have a service portal in service now (our ticketing system) for something like "new DC vlan/service" this takes the mandatory fields from the user (server team) required to create the vlan (name, tag etc) - this creates a request for service...

I was then thinking we wait until the service request is manually sanity checked by a network engineer - the engineer runs the relevant script from an automation host (probably some linux distro) and references the service request ID to populate the required templates (via interrogating the service now API) and the vlan is the programmatically created on the UCS platforms.

To me the manual running of scripts seems a bit clunky - This is our first run at automating elements of network service provision and we dont really have any / or have seen the inner workings of any reference deployments to take inspiration from.

Are there any other components in terms of overall process workflow we could look at ?

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Thanks guys :)