How much do you automate your automation?

[Jon Lewis via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

I've been told that at [some of] the largest networks, network engineers 
"never directly log into network devices".  This implies that all 
configuration changes made to and insights gleaned from the network gear 
are done via some form of automation.

I assume it's commonplace to have/use Unix CLI tools for executing 
configuration changes.  I've written such things for the past couple of 
places I've worked so that we can literally copy&paste from a MOP to a 
shell session and have a change implemented.  Such tools become 
extremely handy when you want to make the same change on a few or a few 
hundred devices.

What I'm wondering is, how common is it to take the next logical step and 
if you have a planned maintenance window to implement some simple change, 
do you have an engineer manually make that change, manually execute a 
script that implements the change, or use old-school automation (at) to 
schedule a date & time at which the script that implements the change will 
be run, and optionally have an engineer monitor that the change happened 
and had the intended results?


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 Jon Lewis, MCP :)              |  I route
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