Top 10 Free Tools to Kick Start Automation

Digital transformation is requiring businesses today to be more dynamic and adaptable to change quickly. What drives transformation is ensuring IT strategies aligned to deliver business value. A key to transformation is automation and when implemented correctly, it allows greater agility and control of processes and even technology.

Below is an overview of the top 10 trending network automation tools to help kick-start any automation strategy. Automation helps organizations become more efficient and allow employees to focus on the more critical parts of the network and its capabilities. Whether trying to implement test automation, security capabilities or automate network services there are many solutions to help with the most interesting parts of your network. Think of this as low hanging fruit that will change the way every-day network management functions happen.

The list below isn’t all-inclusive, but a list of some of the solutions available I have seen help organizations kick-start their automation strategies:

Ranorex

Ranorex is a GUI test automation framework for testing of desktop, web-based and mobile applications. Ranorex provides innovative software test automation solutions.

MongoDB

MongoDB is the leading modern, general purpose database platform, designed to unleash the power of software and data for developers and the applications they build.

Rancher

Rancher Labs builds innovative, open source software that makes it easy to deploy and manage containers in production on any infrastructure. They enable organizations to accelerate all aspects of their software development pipeline, from writing and testing code to running complex microservices-based applications.

Chef 

Chef is the leader in Continuous Automation software with more than a thousand of the most innovative companies around the world to deliver their vision of digital transformation, providing the practices and platform to deliver software at speed.

AppViewX

AppViewX is a global leader in the management, automation, and orchestration of network services in brownfield and greenfield data centers. The AppViewX Platform helps network operations (NetOps) adapt to technology and process demands. Free AppViewX allows customers to experience the power of enterprise-grade automation and orchestration with the click of a button.

Puppet

Puppet provides a platform for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us. Users leverage Puppet’s open source and commercial solutions to adopt DevOps practices, achieve situational awareness and drive software change with confidence. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, Puppet is a privately held company with more than 500 employees around the world. Learn more at puppet.com.

Jenkins

The leading open source automation server, Jenkins is a DevOps tool for monitoring executions of repeated jobs. This extensible automation engine enables DevOps teams to integrate project changes more easily and access outputs for quickly identifying problems.

Vagrant

HashiCorp gives organizations the ability to provision, secure, and run any infrastructure for any application with their Suite, which includes Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Nomad, and Consul. Vagrant, specifically, helps DevOps teams create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments.

Prometheus

Prometheus is an open-source service monitoring system and time series database that powers DevOps teams’ metrics and alerting. Prometheus especially is popular with teams using Grafana.

CFEngine

CFEngine is the industry leader in automation of large-scale, software-defined IT-infrastructure. It helps IT organizations improve productivity in times of growing demands and constrained resources. With CFEngine IT organizations provision new services much faster, while providing continuous availability and security compliance.

With constant change happening across applications and infrastructures, organizations should consider the benefits that automation can deliver. Not every free tool meets the needs of every organization. But through testing and implementation of tools like these, you will find what works best for your existing and even future networking needs.