Automation
Services
Many
tasks within the Information
Technology realm are repetitive in
nature. Some tasks have been
mundane and will be mundane as
long as we have IT systems.
We
try to make the machine do
the majority of the work
any time
we encounter a set of these tasks.
How many
times has your enterprise been faced with changing
ALL of the passwords within your WAN ‘right
now’ due to a personnel action? Or perhaps changing
ALL of the SNMP community strings ‘right now’ due to a security directive.
We
have faced these issues and created several tools
to accommodate the demands.
For
instance, one client ( long before tacacs+ ) had a
policy of changing passwords in the network every
60 days. The network was large enough that it took
several days to accomplish the task manually. When
we introduced this task to the Expect programming
language, the duration of the task immediately went
from days to hours, with far fewer errors!!
Also,
with Perl we were able to automate several aspects
of a network management system such as; capturing
the alert, sorting the actions based on the domain
name, performing relevant checks prior to opening
a trouble ticket, and then opening the trouble ticket.
Expect
and Perl are merely the centerpieces of these efforts.
There are many other environments such as Sed, Awk,
Korn Shell, etc.
We
have been able to automate many tasks thus allowing
Engineers and Administrators just a little more time
to focus on the issues that need human intervention.
Check
out our Resources section,
some of the tools that we have developed are available
for free download.
If
you have any questions please feel free to contact
us.