Improved KPIs with Enhanced Day-2 NetOps
Ahmed Abutaleb describes Nokia IT’s “day-2” reality after moving production to Nokia SR Linux with Nokia Event-Driven Automation (EDA). Operations have shifted from firefighting to routine, repeatable changes thanks to network-as-code practices (CI/CD pipelines, pre-deployment validation in a digital twin) and strong drift detection. The team is pushing further into AI-assisted operations: instead of raw or even correlated alerts, they want automated root-cause analysis (RCA), impact assessment (“don’t wake me if redundancy handled it”), and topology-aware insights.
They chose EDA SaaS deliberately: they aren’t in the business of running the automation platform. SaaS offloads upgrades, health monitoring, and delivers bundled capabilities, letting the team focus on architecture and automation logic. Outcomes include a reported ~80% reduction in tickets, a more stable/consistent fabric, and an ops workload that now centers on physical/access quirks rather than routing/design issues. Looking ahead to 2026, they plan to fold more of their custom automation and pipelines natively into EDA apps, deepen AI features (including chat-style interactions for ops questions), and scale their modular “many mini-DCs” architecture to absorb new sites and acquisitions. Ahmed’s biggest point of pride: a small team that learned SR Linux and modern automation on the fly, shifted from CLI habits to software engineering mindsets, and delivered tangible, resilient change.
This video is number 6 in a series of 6. To see the other posts, visit: https://techstrong.tv/videos/modernizing-the-data-center-nokia-its-netops-playbook
