Requesting some advise from my fellow network admins

Dear fellow network geeks,

I have been lurking this subreddit for a while and decided to make this post.

First off a small introduction: I'm a 29 y/o network engineer and I work for a private cloud based company in the Netherlands. We are currently making little baby steps into Azure. We basically host Citrix environments for our customers in a shared environment.

After working as a system administrator for 5 years, I made the decision (3 years ago) that I wanted to persue a carreer in network administration. My company signed me up for a CCNA fast track course and ever since I have been working on our network devices. In the last years the colleague's that I used to work with left the company and now I am one of the few remaining network engineers at my company.

We are running FortiGates, HPE Comware switches, 2x Juniper MX routers, 2x Juniper SRX routers and a few Cisco IOS Routers/Switches. We also run Netscaler virtual appliances.

Now let me start by saying that in terms of network administration, everything we did until now was based on incident management (solving issues) and we never really "managed" the network. A little while ago my company decided that it was time my focus changed from solving problems to proactively manage our network (Yay!).

I decided that the first items I need to look at are:

- Network monitoring

- Device backups

- Device firmware

- Network automation

As of now I only have 3 years of experience in network administration so I am kind of looking for advise on the topics...

Network monitoring

I have decided to setup Zabbix and do basic monitoring of all my network devices in Zabbix. This is working fine for now. We have a base network monitoring and if we need more in-depth monitoring in the future we are always able to expand with a different tool if needed.

Device backups

We are now backupping all our devices using Kiwi CatTools. Do you guys have any recommendations/advise on this? Are there better tools around for the job?

Device firmware

I honestly don't know how to start here. Right now we do not keep track of firmware levels at all. How do you guys keep track of firmware updates for different vendors and how do you decide if you want to upgrade your devices or not?

Network automation

I am looking into automating simple tasks using Ansible. (Right now everything is done by hand which seems a bit silly to me) I am not really sure if it will fit my needs. How do you guys automate tasks on your network devices? Most solutions will only work for specific vendors, but I kinda need an all-in-one solution and Ansible seemed to be the best place to start..

I am not asking you guys to do my job for me, but maybe you are able to provide me with some sort of advise or start some discussion on the above topics. For me the above are the basics that need to be in place first before anything else, but if you have any advise on that then please let me know as well.. :-)

If these kinds of topics are not welcome in this subreddit then let me know!