Embracing connectivity, automation, and innovation across vendors.
February is the month of love and friendship. At Cisco DevNet, we used that spirit as inspiration to celebrate something we care deeply about: building meaningful connections across the networking ecosystem. The Month of Smart Connections campaign explored how automation and programmability can bring different vendors together through open standards, shared tooling, and practical workflows.
Across four videos, each paired with its own code repository, we showcased vendor-agnostic approaches to network automation. From scripting fundamentals to agentic AI workflows, the Month of Smart Connections delivered practical ideas to help you start or strengthen your multi-vendor automation journey.
Episode 1: Loving All Vendors
Good relationships start when everyone agrees on how to talk to each other.
In this episode, we introduced how to use Cisco Crosswork Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) to pull and commit configurations across multi-vendor environments. One RESTCONF API, zero vendor drama. We also demonstrated two lightweight GitHub Copilot agents designed to help you discover the correct configuration URIs based on the Network Element Driver (NED) of your chosen platform.
Automation works best when tools speak a common language. Sometimes the strongest connections come from learning how to collaborate beyond familiar boundaries.
Episode 2: Choose Your Love Language
There are many ways to express your affection for automation.
In this episode, we explored three approaches: Python scripting, Ansible playbooks, and CI/CD pipelines. While each workflow has its own style, they share the same foundation: OpenConfig as a vendor-agnostic data model and gNMI as the protocol that complements it best.
No matter which toolchain you prefer, open standards allow consistency across environments and teams. The message is simple: your workflow can be personal, but your foundation should be universal.
Episode 3: Trust Issues
Automation only works if you trust what it does.
In this episode, we explored the open-source Robot Framework and expanded it into a vendor-agnostic testing framework tailored for networking. By creating custom Python keywords and leveraging the OpenConfig and gNMI combination once again, we demonstrated how automated validation can become a natural part of network operations.
Testing transforms automation from experimentation into reliability. Trust is not assumed in automation. It is continuously verified.
Episode 4: Intentions Matter
The best connections turn conversations into outcomes.
In the final episode, we built an AI agent to enable ChatOps for everyday multi-vendor networking tasks. Using the open-source platform LibreChat and a carefully designed agent persona, we integrated multiple Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers orchestrated through a single Docker Compose deployment: the pyATS community MCP server alongside official integrations for NetBox, GitHub, and Draw.io.
Through a single chat interface, we synchronized inventories using NetBox and the netbox-secrets plugin for credentials, executed device audits, generated reports committed to GitHub, opened issues automatically, validated and deployed configurations with built-in safeguards, and rendered network diagrams on demand.
The Month of Smart Connections was ultimately about showing that modern network automation is not defined by vendors, but by interoperability, openness, and shared practices. By combining open standards, automation frameworks, testing methodologies, and AI-driven workflows, this series demonstrated how teams can build networks that collaborate as effectively as the people who operate them. Strong automation strategies, like strong relationships, are built over time through consistency, trust, and meaningful connections.
