SoT for ISP Services?

Hey all

Something has been bugging me for quite some time now and I feel like I need to vent a bit... Hopefully someone has/is in a similar position and can relate.

Background:

I work as a Network Engineer for a smallish ISP (400k or so customers) and mostly do design/automation. Right now, most network related things are unfortunately being done manually which of course is quite time consuming and error prone.

Previously I have been focusing my efforts on simplyfying/standardising network configs as well as automation of most tasks that haven't been related to a SoT (as we've never really had a functioning SoT for devices/services).

Lately I have begun to migrate all devices into Netbox (I know it's DC focused, but it's still 10x better than current device database we have) and now automation related to our devices is underway (automatic monitoring, backup, provisioning etc)

The issue:

But the devices themselves as a service provider is just a small part of course. I have tons of ideas related to automation/provisioning of our services. The issue I'm facing is that our services are not documented in a way that a computer can intepret these...

For example, a basic internet service in most cases just says which IP prefix the service is using, no info if it is a route/next-hop ip info/BGP route/directly conencted/which PE Device/Access Device the service is connected to etc. Most of the time if there is any additional info, it is written down in a freetext comments field..

Essentially it requires a human operator to log into the specific PE device in question to see what setup the customer actually has...The system we have in place for storing above service data (inhouse built OSS/BSS system essentially) also doesn't exactly have any good API functionality

The current system in place is unfortunately so bad, that people have begun to document services in Confluence (intranet). But as you can imagine, it is not a good SoT in any way when you want to automate things..Only a human can intepret the data stored there.

So I'm starting to wonder what type of solutions are out there for these types of issues? For documenting SP services (HSIA, L3/L2 VPN etc). In what type of systems do you guys keep your data about the services you provide? In some form of OSS/BSS system?

I feel like it probably shouldn't entirely be the job of a Network Engineer to do this kind of work, but I'm starting to feel like my hands are tied and I can't do any work without there being a decent system in place where via API for example I can fetch data about services in order to provision/configure/monitor them etc.