The Era of Proactive Network Operations

by Valerie DiMartino Oct 16, 2025

For decades, network teams have been fighting fires with limited visibility. We can see devices, interfaces, and links, but we’ve been missing the most critical piece: understanding what the network was actually designed to do. This gap between design and reality is where outages breed and mean time to repair (MTTR) skyrockets.

The Recognition of Real Value

NetBrain has been named a Strong Performer in the recent Gartner® Voice of the Customer for Network Automation Platforms. The Voice of the Customer report synthesizes Gartner Peer Insights™ reviews into insights for IT decision makers.

This approach is resonating in the market. NetBrain has been named a Strong Performer in the 2025 Gartner Voice of the Customer for Network Automation Platforms, with customers giving us a 4.6/5 overall rating and 92% willingness to recommend*. Why?

We believe this is because our platform uniquely decodes organized, high-value data into network intent to achieve the best results. Our AI doesn’t just read the network; it understands the intent behind it. By building on this decoded “network DNA” and infusing human expertise, we solve 100 problems proactively for every one a human finds reactively.

The Hidden Purpose Trapped in Your Network

Every network is built with a purpose—a unique blueprint of security policies, routing designs, and business rules known as its Intent. Yet this critical intelligence remains trapped in static configurations, outdated spreadsheets, and the tribal knowledge of senior engineers. Until now.

Decoding Your Network’s DNA

NetBrain is the first platform to automatically decode your network’s DNA. We use AI and automation to read, model, and map its original intent, transforming it into a living digital twin. This becomes your single source of truth, delivering actionable intelligence to:

• Prevent Outages by catching configuration drift before it causes downtime
• Reduce MTTR with immediate root-cause diagnosis
• Generate Contextual Maps that visualize your network with validated intents overlaid

The 5-Step Journey from Intent to Actionable Intelligence

1. Reverse Engineer Any Hybrid Network
   NetBrain interprets the meaning behind thousands of configurations across multi-vendor and hybrid environments, building a complete understanding of your network’s original purpose.
2. Map Intent in Real Time
   Watch as we automatically generate interactive, intent-aware network maps that visualize policy validation, performance paths, and critical dependencies.
3. Compare Intent vs. Reality—Proactively
   NetBrain continuously compares live network behavior against intended design, delivering precise diagnoses like:
   “VoIP traffic is taking high-latency paths, violating QoS intent.”
   • “Unauthorized changes allow guest-to-finance VLAN access, breaching security intent”
4. AI That Understands the Context of Your Unique Network, Not Just Raw Data
   Unlike traditional AI that analyzes metrics, NetBrain’s AI uses your network’s intent as core context. It doesn’t just flag “high utilization”—it identifies “high utilization on primary VoIP paths violating performance intent” with rerouting solutions.
5. Prescribe the Fix, Not Just the Problem
   Get guided, actionable recommendations with one-click remediation workflows that restore compliance with original design intent.

The Agentic NetOps Revolution

This intent-based approach positions us at the forefront of what Gartner calls “Agentic NetOps”—the next evolution in network management. As the 2025 Gartner Agentic NetOps Will Revolutionize Network Operations report predicts, “by 2030, 50% of organizations will use agentic NetOps with minimal human involvement, up from nearly 0% in 2025.”

• NetBrain is already making this vision a reality by combining: Intent-Based Automation that enables AI agents to operate autonomously
• Dynamic Digital Twin providing essential context for safe AI operations
• Closed-Loop Resolution ensuring trust and reliability in AI-driven actions

Real-World Intents Driving Value Today

The Five Practical Use Cases for Intent-Based Automation

Network automation projects fall into five broad categories, all powered by a foundation of understood intent:

1. Problem Diagnosis: Capture the tribal knowledge of senior engineers into automated runbooks. This allows tier-1 engineers to resolve common issues quickly without escalation, drastically reducing MTTR.
2. Network Security: Define, verify, and enforce security policies at scale. Automate checks for misconfigurations like open ports or insecure management consoles to shrink your attack surface.
3. Outage Prevention: Proactively identify and fix configuration drift, performance degradation, and failover failures before they impact production services.
4. Protective Change Management: Validate that device-level changes will not negatively impact application delivery before the change is finalized.
5. Application Performance: Gain a continuous, end-to-end view of all application traffic flows to ensure they meet designated KPIs, regardless of where they are hosted.

Automating these categories starts with the ability to describe your network’s intent in extreme detail. Once captured, these behavior intents become the tireless, replicable foundation for managing your network at scale.

Top Network Intents from NetBrain Users

These are just a few of the top Intents our customers have applied in their networks.

Topic	Challenge	Solution
Compliance Validation for AWS EC2 Instances	Time-consuming to manually track EC2 instance configuration details.	Intents continuously assess each operating parameter across all instances.
Native VLAN Compliance Check	Identify trunk ports with non-compliant native VLANs on a regular basis.	Intents verify the configuration of trunk ports to detect non-compliant VLANs enabled.
# Days Since Interface Down	Manually identifying ALL/ANY inactive physical ports for service provisioning.	Intents assess the number of days since interfaces had active status.
Administrator password access compliance	Manually identifying device access security across the network.	Intents assess devices with password access violations across the entire network.
Proactive CISCO ACI Performance & Service Assurance	Widescale deployments of Cisco ACI include thousands of operating parameters that should be verified.	Intents assess the amount of available CPU and memory for the entire fabric.
Monitoring Transient OSPF Neighbor Flaps Using Log Analysis	Limited ability to detect transient flapping at scale due to size and complexity.	Intents continuously assess OSPF neighbor state changes over time.
Failover and resiliency validation	Difficult to verify the entire failover architecture until it is too late.	Intents assess availability and performance for all resiliency pathways; active and backup.

 

From Reactive Guessing to Proactive Certainty

The era of guessing what your network was meant to do is over. By unlocking and operationalizing your network’s intent, you can finally shift from reactive firefighting to proactive assurance. The technology exists today to understand not just what your network is doing, but what it was designed to do—and ensure it stays that way.

Stop guessing. Start knowing. Transform your network operations from reactive troubleshooting to intent-driven certainty with NetBrain—the platform recognized by customers as a Strong Performer in Gartner’s Voice of the Customer report.

 

*Based on 23 reviews as of July 2025.

Gartner, Voice of the Customer for Network Automation Platforms, By Peer Contributors, 25 June 2025.

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