Please help, I’m overwhelmed.

I’ll try and make this short. I’ve been in the network (Cisco) field for about 12 years so I’m definitely not new.

I started in a new position about 7 months ago, I’m the only network guy in a group of electrical and instrument people supporting a network spread a cross multiple industrial facilities. The team rebuilt their network last year before I started and the new design (done by a third party) is actually very well done in terms of segmentation and security, and the majority of the gear is very new.

I’ve been working to learn the network and get my bearings while also helping out with some other non-network related projects. In the last few months I’ve had to make a lot of changes in the network to accommodate the new projects and it’s been an absolute nightmare.

We have 250+ devices (switches, firewalls, AP’s, WLC, etc.) spread across half a dozen facilities. Now to my issues, the team has no NMS, no central configuration backups, no change management, and no consolidated way to make changes on multiple devices (for example updating the NTP server on each switch).

I feel like I’m running blind and am doing way more work than I have to. It took me 4+ hours last month to update multiple settings on each switch at one facility.

I’ve just started to use Python and Netmiko to backup configuration on our firewalls and switches via SSH and a couple facilities. I also spun up LibreNMS at home and it may be a good start to getting some visibility into the network. I feel like this is a small step forward and I feel good about it, but I really don’t know where to go next.

What do I need to learn in my free time to make my life easier at work? What tools and technologies are going to have the most ROI for me supporting this network by myself, and what new skills are going to pay off for me the most in the next few years. While IaC and network automation sound sexy, I just need some practical tools and skills to work towards that are going to make supporting this environment easier and make my life better.