EMA White Paper | Taking a Strategic Approach to Network Operations uilding on that same continuously discovered data model, the etrain solution implements a highly accessible automation engine that can be used by anyone to diagnose and solve network problems at scale etrain does so by capturing the first occurrence of problem diagnostics using a no-code approach and makes that knowledge and experience executable at any time in the future, by anyone, when solving similar problems The etrain platform automates problem diagnosis, which greatly reduces MTT¢ y making knowledge executable and repeatable, it eliminates the resource-intensive tedium of resolving the same common problems repeatedly etrain can also be configured to validate and enforce operational rules that must exist for the litany of business applications to function properly etrain’s preventive automation capabili- ties assure that time-sensitive applications like ¨oI£ will continue to function by uickly pinpointing problem areas caused by network configuration changes and reducing the time it takes to troubleshoot them EMA Perspective The global pandemic increased attrition rates among experienced IT workers, which has caused IT executives to rethink their strategies and investment priorities for the delivery of critical IT business services This resource pressure has prompted growing interest in network automation ¦owever, in con- versations with very large enterprises where networks are largescale, we still find that many of these automation efforts are tactical and shortsighted ­or example, a very large financial company developed a homegrown zero-touch provisioning server to automate onboarding of switches ¦owever, it did not automate the ongoing process for gathering performance data needed for executing automation Instead, network engineers sometimes spend several hours gathering data needed to automate operations etwork teams need to adopt tools that have complete visibility and provide automation for networks end- to-end The days of maintaining siloed tools for individual tasks are over etwork operations teams must look for ways to combine automation across data centers, ‡†s, †s, and the cloud They should adopt platforms with visibility into the intent and the state of the network to minimize manual data gathering The platform should capture the knowledge of the network team’s experts to make it available to the entire network team in the form of no-code runbooks Many network managers know etrain for its stateful discovery and mapping of networks, but etrain is not •ust a tactical network automation solution It offers the end-to-end strategic automation that ƒM† recommends It is an ideal tool for enterprises that want to shift from tactical to strategic automation from human-centric to machine-centric automation 4