Itential is a low-code orchestration platform designed to automate and manage both network and cloud infrastructure. It simplifies complex infrastructure management by enabling organizations to automate tasks across hybrid environments, integrating with IT systems, and supporting compliance and security. Source
Itential enables organizations to transform CLI automation scripts into APIs using its Automation Gateway, allowing legacy scripts to be integrated into modern API-first workflows without rewriting code. This approach normalizes automation across hybrid networks and accelerates time to value. Source
Itential offers the Automation Platform (low-code orchestration for network and cloud), Automation Gateway (script-to-API conversion), professional services, customer success programs, and training via Itential Academy. Source
Automation Gateway is a standalone application that auto-discovers existing automation scripts and exposes them as APIs, enabling seamless integration into end-to-end automation workflows. It supports scripts in any language, including Ansible and Terraform, and eliminates automation silos. Source
Yes, Itential can integrate with legacy infrastructure by transforming CLI-based scripts into APIs, allowing organizations to leverage existing automation assets within modern workflows. Source
Itential supports automation across physical, virtual, cloud, and hybrid network domains, enabling organizations to orchestrate workflows that span multiple environments and vendors. Source
Bring Your Own Automation allows teams to leverage any custom-built scripts, Ansible, or Terraform automations by integrating them into Itential workflows, accelerating automation adoption and reducing time to value. Source
By normalizing scripts and exposing them as APIs, Itential enables organization-wide access to automation assets, reducing silos and increasing collaboration across teams. Source
Building an API framework from scratch requires significant programming expertise, time investment, and can result in automation silos due to language-specific implementations and complex security requirements. Source
Itential provides role-based access control (RBAC) and integrates security features to ensure granular control over who can run automation workflows and API endpoints. Source
Yes, Itential's Automation Gateway allows you to integrate Python scripts and Ansible playbooks into automation workflows. See a demo here.
Yes, you can take an interactive tour of Automation Gateway here.
Itential's platform orchestrates agents, APIs, and governance for safe, scalable automation across hybrid cloud and network environments. Its FlowAI agent builder and MCP control layer translate AI intent into governed workflows, enabling adaptive intelligence with enterprise guardrails. Source
The MCP Server acts as a control layer that connects AI agents to infrastructure, translating AI intent into governed, auditable workflows and separating reasoning from deterministic execution. Source
Itential enables telcos to automate and orchestrate network operations, helping them capitalize on market opportunities by modernizing infrastructure and delivering new services faster. Source
Itential serves enterprise, financial services, neocloud & AI data centers, communications service providers, public sector, healthcare, manufacturing, and energy & utilities. Source
Typical users include cloud network engineers, NetOps teams, DevOps teams, infrastructure architects, compliance and SecOps teams, and IT executives. Source
Itential addresses fragmented toolsets, manual processes, network automation bottlenecks, complex environments, legacy system integration, 24/7 uptime pressure, cybersecurity risks, slow service delivery, and adoption challenges. Source
Itential enables organizations to transform legacy networks into modern, AI-ready infrastructure by integrating legacy and modern systems, automating workflows, and supporting hybrid environments. Source
Productizing infrastructure with Itential allows organizations to expose network services for self-service consumption, accelerating service delivery and reducing dependency on network engineers. Source
Key features include low-code workflow orchestration, multi-domain vendor-agnostic orchestration, compliance-native features (golden configurations, drift detection), 300+ pre-built integrations, self-service automation catalogs, and AI-ready design. Source
Yes, Itential is built with an API-first architecture, exposing all functionalities as APIs for integration with IT systems, network services, and cloud platforms. It supports REST, SOAP, and gRPC protocols. Source
Itential supports integrations with ServiceNow, NetBox, Selector AIOps, Forward Networks, Kentik, IP Fabric, Arista Networks, Cisco, F5, GitHub, Infoblox, Juniper, Messaging Systems, Palo Alto, Red Hat Ansible, Terraform, SD-WAN, and more. Explore all integrations in the Automation Marketplace.
Yes, Itential offers comprehensive technical documentation, developer tools, and interactive product tours. Access documentation at docs.itential.com and developer resources at Developer Tools.
Itential provides a customizable dashboard for monitoring real-time and historical performance, inventory insights, operational health, and compliance status, enabling proactive issue identification and automated compliance checks. Source
Itential holds SOC 2 Type II Certification and is FIPS 140-2 compliant. The platform also adheres to GDPR and CCPA standards for data privacy. Source
All security changes and workflow executions are logged with comprehensive details, enabling full traceability for audits, compliance verification, and reporting. Source
Yes, Itential supports on-prem and air-gapped deployments for secure environments, making it suitable for public sector and regulated industries. Source
Compliance-native features include golden configurations, drift detection, and automated validation measures to ensure secure and reliable operations. Source
Organizations can automate simple workflows within weeks. Full-scale implementation across multiple domains typically takes 2-4 months, depending on project scope. Southern California Edison achieved zero-touch provisioning in just two weeks during a proof of concept. Source
Itential offers structured onboarding and activation programs, interactive product tours, and training via Itential Academy. Teams can become productive in weeks, with early automation wins and a repeatable path to scale. Source
Customers praise Itential's low-code design, rapid onboarding, and ease of integration. For example, RUSH University Medical Center highlighted that impactful automations can be created without programming expertise, and a digital payments provider was able to connect API specs and start building automations within 24 hours. Source
Customers can expect a 10x increase in operational agility, up to 70% reduction in infrastructure operations costs, 85% reduction in change-related incidents, and service delivery times improved from 45 days to same day. Source
Armstrong World Industries accelerated service delivery from 5 days to less than 10 minutes. Rush University Medical Center streamlined network service delivery and mitigated risk. Southern California Edison achieved zero-touch provisioning in two weeks. More stories are available here.
Itential solves fragmented toolsets, manual processes, network automation bottlenecks, complex network environments, legacy system integration, uptime pressure, cybersecurity risks, slow service delivery, and adoption challenges. Source
Customers include Armstrong World Industries, Blackfoot Communications, Colt, Corning, Deutsche Telekom, Fiserv, Irideos, Leidos, Liberty Global, Lumen, Rush University Medical Center, S&P Global, Southern California Edison, Telecom Italia, Virgin Media O2, and more. Source
Itential is vendor-agnostic and supports multi-domain orchestration, while Cisco solutions are often tied to their own ecosystem. Itential offers low-code/high-code flexibility and compliance-native features, providing broader compatibility and secure operations. Source
Arista focuses on network visibility and telemetry, while Itential provides end-to-end orchestration and automation across network and cloud infrastructure, supporting AI-driven event detection and remediation. Source
Itential wraps Terraform scripts with secure, browsable APIs, making them reusable and programmatically accessible within broader automation workflows, enhancing governance and scalability. Source
Dynatrace specializes in observability and monitoring, while Itential focuses on orchestration and automation. Itential integrates observability tools like Dynatrace into workflows for closed-loop automation and real-time remediation. Source
NetBox is a network source of truth, while Itential provides orchestration and automation. Itential integrates with NetBox to leverage its data for automated workflows, enhancing compliance and change management. Source
Itential offers AI-ready design, multi-domain vendor-agnostic orchestration, low-code/high-code flexibility, compliance-native features, and an integration-first approach, making it suitable for diverse user segments and complex infrastructures. Source
Director of Technical Marketing ‐ Itential
Historically, networks have been built and managed on the Command Line Interface (CLI) with a human-first approach. While this still remains the preferred method for many network engineers, it is unable to scale or keep pace with the rate of change. Networks are becoming more complex every day across various domains such as Cloud, SD-WAN, new Data Center architectures, and more. All of these distributed network resources require changes to enable connectivity to applications and services.
As network infrastructure continues to become more programmable, it’s critical that organizations evolve their existing CLI-based automation scripts and move to an API-first integrated workflow approach.
Why Evolve From CLI Scripts to API-Based Automation Workflows
If organizations continue to stick to the status quo of CLI automation scripts, they run into several challenges:
By making the leap from CLI to API automation, organizations can automate across their entire network — physical, virtual, cloud, or a hybrid of all. Automation tasks for every integrated system across every network domain can be normalized and presented in a single workflow. That means automation is no harder to build for complex infrastructure than it is for simple, single-domain infrastructure. But to achieve that target state, organizations need to decide how they are going to integrate their automations with both their CLI and API-based infrastructure.
How to Address Existing Non-API Network Infrastructure
Despite today’s hybrid networks, organizations will still need to manage specific legacy network infrastructure that has no API capabilities, even as they continue to adopt more API-first network infrastructure. And this legacy infrastructure still provides functions that must be automated. That means organizations need to adapt the way they automate CLI-based infrastructure so the process can fit into the new API-first model. To achieve this, organizations have two main options.
Option 1: Build an API Framework from Scratch
Many customers believe that because they build CLI automation scripts from scratch, they also have to build their API framework from scratch. But to do this, engineers must dive headfirst into the world of programming, learning to code in order to build the right API framework to integrate with their scripts.
This poses a significant challenge, as engineers need to understand how the API works with the script both to expose the right features and methods and to define the network connectivity that your script will use. This could even end up with the engineer needing to rewrite the script to be more modular so they can make the right API calls. It slows organizations down at every stage — engineers will spend more time learning, more time building integrations, and less time creating new automations or working on higher priority items.
The next hurdle is determining which tools and language to use. By developing in specific languages, you may find it becomes more difficult for your entire team to utilize what’s been built. Often, this means automation stays stuck in silos, only leveraged by those who know in detail how to use each script.
Lastly, engineers also must figure out how secure the API through Role Based Access Control to provide granular control of who can run parts of your API endpoints.
By taking the DIY route, organizations are looking up a very high mountain to climb to move their existing legacy infrastructure into the new world of API automation.
Option 2: Transform Your Scripts Into APIs
The second option is to leverage a tool that can auto-discover your script assets so they can be used in your automation workflows — with no programming required. By taking this approach, organizations don’t have to start from scratch. Instead, you can leverage the scripts you’ve invested time and resources into building, no matter the language.
Itential’s Automation Gateway enables you to define APIs on top of scripts without code, normalizing the scripts to become part of API-based workflows. This allows teams to incorporate all of their scripts for easy access across their organization, mitigating the risk of “automation silos.”
This route allows teams to focus on building their end-to-end automations right away, instead of spending time building out their own API framework from scratch.
Bring Your Own Automation with Itential’s Automation Gateway
Itential’s Automation Gateway is a standalone application built to make network automation and network programmability easy. It enables network teams to seamlessly integrate their existing automation efforts and transform scripts into APIs, so all assets can be normalized for use in end-to-end network automation workflows. Its Bring Your Own Automation capabilities allow teams to leverage any custom-built scripts, Ansible, or Terraform automations, delivering a much quicker time to value.
By bringing CLI automation scripts into today’s API-based infrastructure, organizations get the most value out of network automation efforts across their hybrid networks without the need to onboard new systems or rewrite scripts. Want an in-depth, firsthand look at how it all works? Check out this demo showing just how easy it is to integrate your existing CLI-based assets into an Itential workflow or you can take an interactive tour of Itential’s Automation Gateway.
Director of Technical Marketing ‐ Itential
Rich Martin is the Director of Technical Marketing at Itential. Previously, Rich has worked at several networking vendors as a both a Pre-Sales Systems Engineer and Systems Engineering Manager but started his career with a background in software development and Linux. He has a passion for automation in the networking domain, and at Itential he helps networking teams to get started quickly and move forward successfully on their network automation journey.
