Day 2+ NetOps: Operational intelligence, AI hints and measurable outcomes
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 blog post is the final one in a series of five with Ahmed Abutaleb and Scott Robohn on Nokia’s data center network migration. To see the other posts, visit: Data center networks blogs.
