Automating Maintenance Notifications

Despite all the recent progress around network automation, there's one aspect of our operations that for many remains stuck in a manual past. Most of us deal with …

Despite all the recent progress around network automation, there’s one aspect of our operations that for many remains stuck in a manual past. Most of us deal with maintenance notifications - both those we get and those we send - by throwing people at the problem. In this talk we’ll provide an alternative approach. We’ll start with an overview of Facebook’s automation solution, how they built a network that automatically responds to maintenance notifications, the challenges they’ve overcome and the ones that remain. One difficult challenge is the sheer diversity and ever shifting formatting of maintenance notifications. We’ll present a draft standard for maintenance notifications that seeks to address these challenges and describe how the standard can be put to use.