Unlocking Benefits of Hybrid Multicloud IT Automation

A few years ago, the Nutanix IT team knew there was a better way, so they began tinkering. Their hybrid multi-cloud operations were humming, but managing assets across public clouds, virtual private clouds and traditional data centers was increasingly challenging. They needed a better, faster way to know what was where so they could meet growing requests for IT resources and find operational efficiencies without increasing team size.

As reported in The Forecast, a small group inside the Nutanix IT team turned to open-source software called NetBox, a data center infrastructure management (DCIM) and internet protocol address management (IPAM) tool. Using the open-source software and APIs, the Nutanix IT team made it easier to find both on-prem and cloud assets, accounting for everything in their IT environment — racks, wireless devices, IP addresses, virtual machines and everything else. It created a single source of truth for stakeholders who need to see what and where resources are running. 

“You no longer have to visit three separate cloud consoles and manually consolidate information to get a unified view of your cloud assets,” Danko Trajkovic, manager of network automation at Nutanix told The Forecast.

This innovation was a game-changer for Nutanix, highlighting the types of advancements that can be achieved when IT teams have the time, support and motivation to innovate around business challenges. 

“The previous environment had separate “sources of truth” for each type of asset,” said Eric Pearce, an IT systems architect at Nutanix.

He said cloud assets were separate from physical assets, forcing the IT team to switch between tools or APIs to manage them

“We now have a single place to put everything, where every group can pull data or add data and that's a game-changer for me.”

Editor’s note: Read Eric Pearce's A Self-Maintaining Data Center Inventory.

It led the IT team to new improvements. The NetBox API is now the center of all network automation for the Nutanix Network Team.

“It [NetBox] doesn't automate — it enables automation.” Trajkovic said.

Creating a Self-Maintained Data Center Inventory

Even with high visibility provided by single-pane views of data center assets, the Nutanix team recognized that traditional manual processes requiring hand-entered data for hardware life cycle processes such as hardware provisioning, replacement of failed components and decommissioning were proving outdated and error-ridden at scale.

They needed an automated, accurate, near-real-time inventory management system that could handle both on-premises and hybrid multi-cloud environments while also providing visibility and searchability to drive practical usability.

“Automating this process would eliminate the need for manual data entry, significantly reducing the risk of errors and ensuring that the inventory data remained current and reliable,” Pearce told The Forecast. “If you have any sort of disconnect between the inventory data, the actual hardware and it’s location within the data  center, this becomes a nightmare for the data center management staff who have to reconcile these differences manually and under time pressure.”

The team developed Python “crawler” scripts to automate the data collection process. These scripts were designed to continuously scan the network for various IT assets, including physical servers, VMs, and network devices to gather information such as asset names, serial numbers, statuses, IP addresses, hardware details including CPU, RAM and interfaces and 3D physical locations within the data center (i.e. row, rack and rack U elevation)

The team had already developed effective methods to normalize data across sources, tagging assets and displaying them on a unified interface. This allowed them to levarage NetBox's plugin system to create custom visualizations, so inventory data can be seen clearly and quickly on a computer screen. This includes network diagrams, rack elevations and other graphical representations of the data center infrastructure. 

“This visual data helps with capacity planning, resource management and security measures because it’s easy to see and understand,” said Pearce.

Example of a data center rack with two types of capacity management in action. Left: rack capacity, shown by the “U” elevation numbers, where locations U3 and U4 are empty.  Right: capacity is within the server chassis, where the “block035 (3/4)” notation shows that only three out of four available chassis bays are populated.

“NetBox allows capacity calculations to be viewed across tens of thousands of devices,” said Pearce. “We also enhance the inventory with hardware ‘owner’ and ‘team’ data, so that we can notify specific individuals or groups that are affected by scheduled maintenance work or determine the impact of an unplanned event.

The system was also designed to automatically detect changes in the infrastructure and update the NetBox database in close to real time. Dynamic updating ensures that asset inventory is always up-to-date, reflecting the latest changes and additions without requiring any manual intervention.

Self-Maintained Inventory System

Looking ahead, the Nutanix IT team outlined key benefits of having an automated IT inventory system:

• Reduced Manual Labor and Errors: Automated data collection and synchronization drastically reduce the need for manual data entry and minimizes the risk of human error, freeing up IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives.

• Near Real-Time Data Accuracy: Continuous updates ensure that inventory data is always current and accurate, providing a reliable basis for critical management initiatives like capacity planning, resource allocation, budgeting, hardware refreshes and strategic decision-making.

• Enhanced Security: Accurate, up-to-date inventory data helps to quickly audit assets, identify security vulnerabilities,  quickly locate asset owners, resolve issues,all enhancing the overall enterprise security posture.

• Scalability: Scalability delivered by Netbox software ensures that it can grow with the enterprise, accommodating future expansions and evolving infrastructure needs without a proportional increase in management effort and staffing

• Cost Efficiency: Netbox is free and eliminates the need for expensive commercial solutions that typically charge a  per-asset fee. Its automated nature also reduces the operational costs associated with manual inventory management.

Pearce saw the possibility of a self-maintaining asset inventory many years ago, but never had enough resources and support until now.  

“I had the idea, but it didn’t become feasible until Danko brought in NetBox as the source of truth for network automation,” said Pearce. “We also needed to create a team with sufficient coding talent and gain sufficient backing from leadership to drive the project forward.” 

He said tools like Netbox not only help improve IT operations, while the knowledge and innovations gained are shared with the open source community, enabling other organizations to bring new capabilities to their own organizations. 

“Things like error reduction, higher worker productivity and getting more time to focus on strategic activities are just a few of the bigger benefits I see,” said Pearce. “This helps us ensure IT operations align with strategic goals and budget constraints and can still respond quickly to changing needs.”

Pearce pointed to other benefits, including enhanced security, infrastructure visibility and ease of use from DCIM tools, which can build trust between IT and non-technical teams that need data for decision-making. 

“Data can be exported in common formats such as CSV, which allows non-technical users to crunch data offline using their favorite tools,” said Pearce.

“Once you have a trusted source of truth that is accessible via an API, people will start to consume the data in a manner that you could have never predicted or planned for,” said Pearce.  

“I think this is the ultimate validation for what we built.”

Ken Kaplan is Editor in Chief for The Forecast by Nutanix. Find him on X @kenekaplan.

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