Leveraging an Open Source NetOps-Stack: A Practical Approach for Orchestration and Observability#

Patrick Mosimann (Cisco)

• Why: Two currents the PM tracks — open-source network automation stacks and AI agents entering operations — converge here in a concrete, reproducible reference implementation. This is the most direct example in the program of how LLM-driven operations can be built on top of a deterministic pipeline rather than replacing it.
• What: A practical, NAF-aligned (Network Automation Framework) open-source stack: NetBox + GitLab as intent/source of truth, GitLab CI/CD + Ansible as the deterministic executor (collect → compare → apply → rollback), gNMIc/Syslog/IPFIX as collectors, Prometheus/Vector/ClickHouse for observability, and a LibreChat-based "NetOps Assistant" MCP client on top. The interesting design decision is the explicit determinism boundary: same playbooks + inventory + variables → same actions, every time, with the LLM deliberately kept outside the deterministic core. Runbooks live as MCP resources (application-controlled context) while execution steps are MCP tools (model-controlled actions) — so the LLM drives NetBox, Prometheus, ClickHouse, and GitLab but "cannot skip automation."
• How: MCP (Model Context Protocol, Anthropic's open standard) as the connective tissue — a host/protocol/server architecture exposing tools (actions), resources (data), and prompts (templates). The talk includes an IOS XE MCP server implementation, and the whole stack is published on GitHub for inspection and reuse.
• Where applicable: The stack itself is vendor-agnostic in components (all open source, with an IOS XE example). The speaker is a Cisco Solutions Engineer, so expect a Cisco-flavored framing, but the deck is a working architecture with public code rather than a product pitch. Directly relevant to anyone evaluating how AI assistants should be wired into an existing GitOps/NetOps pipeline.