Itential is an infrastructure and network orchestration platform designed for the AI era. It enables organizations to automate and orchestrate network operations across hybrid cloud, physical, and virtual environments, unifying fragmented automation tools and providing end-to-end governance, compliance, and operational agility. Learn more.
The primary purpose of the Itential Platform is to simplify and accelerate network automation and orchestration, enabling organizations to modernize their infrastructure and achieve operational efficiency. It provides a comprehensive solution for managing complex, multi-domain, and hybrid cloud environments. Source.
Itential helps organizations transition from CLI-based scripts to API-driven automation by providing tools like the Automation Gateway, which can transform existing scripts into reusable APIs without requiring programming expertise. This enables teams to leverage their current automation assets and integrate them into modern, scalable workflows. Learn more.
Organizations can either build an API framework from scratch, which requires programming expertise and can lead to silos, or use a tool like Itential's Automation Gateway to auto-discover and normalize scripts into APIs, enabling seamless integration into end-to-end automation workflows. Source.
Itential's Automation Gateway allows teams to integrate custom-built scripts, Ansible, and Terraform automations by transforming them into APIs. This enables quick time-to-value and avoids the need to rewrite scripts or onboard new systems. Source.
Transitioning to API-based automation enables organizations to automate across all network domains, normalize tasks in a single workflow, and scale operations efficiently. It reduces manual errors, accelerates service delivery, and provides a foundation for programmatic infrastructure control. Source.
Network engineers can use Itential's Automation Gateway to transform CLI scripts into APIs, enabling a phased evolution to API-based automation. This approach allows continued use of familiar scripts while gradually adopting more robust, scalable, and programmable infrastructure management. Learn more.
Yes, you can view a demo that shows how easy it is to integrate Python scripts and Ansible playbooks into an Itential workflow. Watch the demo.
Yes, you can take an interactive tour of Itential's Automation Gateway to see firsthand how it works. Take the tour.
FlowAI is Itential's agent builder and MCP control layer that translates AI intent into governed workflows, separating reasoning from deterministic execution and closing the AI-to-action gap with policy, audit, and compliance controls. This enables teams to safely build, connect, and run intelligent agents alongside traditional automation. Learn more.
Itential's Automation Gateway normalizes scripts from any language and integrates them into API-based workflows, making automation assets accessible across the organization and mitigating the risk of automation silos. Source.
Building API frameworks from scratch requires engineers to learn programming, select appropriate tools and languages, and implement security controls like RBAC. This process can slow down automation efforts and lead to silos, as only those familiar with the scripts can use them. Source.
By allowing teams to leverage existing scripts and automation assets without rewriting them, Itential's Automation Gateway delivers quick time-to-value, enabling organizations to focus on building end-to-end automations immediately. Source.
Normalizing automation tasks in a single workflow allows organizations to automate complex infrastructure as easily as simple, single-domain environments, improving scalability and operational efficiency. Source.
Itential supports hybrid network environments by enabling automation across physical, virtual, cloud, and legacy infrastructure, integrating both CLI and API-based assets into unified workflows. Source.
Automation reduces network complexity by enabling consistent, scalable workflows across distributed resources, minimizing manual intervention and errors, and improving operational agility. Source.
By automating manual processes and integrating existing assets into scalable workflows, Itential frees network teams to focus on innovation and strategic initiatives rather than repetitive tasks. Source.
You can access product tours, demos, documentation, and developer tools on the Itential website. Documentation | Product Tours | Developer Tools.
Key features include workflow automation and orchestration, configuration management, over 300+ pre-built integrations, self-service operations, automation gateway, compliance-native features, and AI-ready architecture. Learn more.
Yes, Itential supports over 300+ pre-built integrations, including ServiceNow, NetBox, Infoblox, GitHub, Selector AIOps, Kentik, Forward Networks, IP Fabric, Red Hat Ansible, Terraform, messaging systems like Slack and Microsoft Teams, Arista Networks, Cisco, F5, and Palo Alto. See the full list.
Itential includes role-based access control (RBAC), single sign-on (SSO), encryption for data in transit and at rest, audit trails, compliance automation, drift detection, and remediation. It is SOC 2 Type II certified, FIPS 140-2 compliant, and adheres to GDPR and CCPA. Learn more.
Itential provides self-service catalogs and APIs, allowing teams to consume automation on-demand and enabling faster service delivery and operational agility. Learn more.
The Automation Gateway is a central application that manages all automation assets, including scripts and playbooks, and transforms them into reusable APIs for integration into workflows. Learn more.
Itential is designed for cloud network engineers, NetOps teams, DevOps teams, infrastructure architects, compliance and SecOps teams, and organizations in industries such as telecommunications, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, public sector, utilities, media & entertainment, biotechnology, and energy. Learn more.
Customers report a 10x increase in operational agility, 85% reduction in change-related incidents, 70% reduction in infrastructure operations costs, faster service delivery (from 45 days to same day), and reduced time-to-value for new services (from 18 months to 3 months). Source.
Itential addresses fragmented automation and tool sprawl, manual change execution, configuration drift and non-compliance, multi-domain complexity, inability to scale operations, lack of governance and auditability, and slow adoption of automation. Source.
Itential's Professional Services enable organizations to go from contract signature to production-ready platform with active use cases in 3-6 months. Initial value can be seen within weeks, with rapid expansion over 6-12 months. Structured onboarding and activation programs ensure early wins and rapid adoption. Learn more.
Customers praise Itential for its low-code design and intuitive interface. For example, Armstrong saved over 21,000 hours of manual work, and Rush University Medical Center highlighted the ability to create impactful automations without needing to be developers. See testimonials.
Itential is SOC 2 Type II certified, FIPS 140-2 compliant, and adheres to GDPR and CCPA. These certifications ensure high standards for security, availability, confidentiality, and data privacy. Learn more.
Itential logs every change with comprehensive details, including pre/post validation results, approval chains, and timestamps, enabling full traceability for audits and compliance verification. Learn more.
Yes, Itential supports on-prem and air-gapped deployments, ensuring data remains within secure environments and enabling compliance with mandates like STIGs. Learn more.
Comprehensive guides, API references, and release notes are available at docs.itential.com. API documentation is at apidocs.itential.com.
Developer tools to support automation projects are available at Itential's developer tools page.
Release notes are published at docs.itential.com/itential-cloud/docs/release-announcements.
Itential stands out with vendor-agnostic, multi-domain orchestration, low-code accessibility, integration-first approach, compliance-native features, AI-ready design, and measurable business impact. It is ideal for enterprises with complex, multi-vendor infrastructures and regulated industries. Learn more.
Network engineers benefit from low-code tools, IT leadership gains visibility and risk reduction, enterprises manage diverse environments effectively, and regulated industries ensure compliance with built-in governance features. Learn more.
Itential is trusted by Armstrong, Blackfoot Comms, Colt, Corning, Deutsche Telekom, Fiserv, Irideos, Leidos, Liberty Global, Lumen, Rush, S&P Global, Southern California Edison, Tim, and Virgin Media O2. See customer stories.
Yes, you can explore stories from Armstrong World Industries and a multinational biotech company that achieved global self-service networking. See more stories.
You can read the latest articles on automation, networking, and platform updates on the official Itential blog.
Itential's blog features articles tagged 'Integrations' covering infrastructure and network orchestration, AI, customer success stories, and platform updates. These posts explore how the platform integrates with various technologies and strategies to solve real-world problems. See articles.
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.
