Challenges of DIY Network Automation

Shamus McGillicuddy

Unlike other areas of IT operations where commercial tools dominate, network teams continue to rely heavily on homegrown scripts and open-source tools — despite the costs.

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest Enterprise Management Associates (EMA™) report.

Network engineers often talk about the 80/20 rule with network automation. Most vendors can fulfill 80% of network automation use cases with commercial tools, but there always remains that 20% that only a DIY approach can address. The report explores a possible hybrid approach, where engineers can merge their DIY automation with commercial platforms to hit 100% of use cases more efficiently and effectively.

Based on 12 in-depth interviews with enterprise network automation experts, this new report examines why do-it-yourself (DIY) network automation persists, the value it offers, and the hidden costs and risks it introduces. It also explores how network automation vendors can enhance or replace these tools without disrupting existing operations.

Some of the key findings from the report include:

  • The drivers of DIY network automation include budget issues and the need to have full control over an automation roadmap.
  • DIY automation strategies typically struggle with skills gaps in the network automation team, tool complexity, usability issues.
  • Network automation pros would like vendors to deliver value around tool governance, modularity and extensibility, and logging and reporting.

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Challenges of DIY Network Automation

Shamus McGillicuddy

Unlike other areas of IT operations where commercial tools dominate, network teams continue to rely heavily on homegrown scripts and open-source tools — despite the costs.

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest Enterprise Management Associates (EMA™) report.

Network engineers often talk about the 80/20 rule with network automation. Most vendors can fulfill 80% of network automation use cases with commercial tools, but there always remains that 20% that only a DIY approach can address. The report explores a possible hybrid approach, where engineers can merge their DIY automation with commercial platforms to hit 100% of use cases more efficiently and effectively.

Based on 12 in-depth interviews with enterprise network automation experts, this new report examines why do-it-yourself (DIY) network automation persists, the value it offers, and the hidden costs and risks it introduces. It also explores how network automation vendors can enhance or replace these tools without disrupting existing operations.

Some of the key findings from the report include:

  • The drivers of DIY network automation include budget issues and the need to have full control over an automation roadmap.
  • DIY automation strategies typically struggle with skills gaps in the network automation team, tool complexity, usability issues.
  • Network automation pros would like vendors to deliver value around tool governance, modularity and extensibility, and logging and reporting.

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MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

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In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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Signs It May Be Time to Reassess Your IT Infrastructure Strategy

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Enterprise Edge AI Reaches Inflection Point

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

AI Is Hitting Operational Limits

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

Alert Fatigue Is No Longer a Morale Problem, It's a Reliability Risk and a System Failure

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

Most Enterprises Think They Can Switch AI Vendors in a Month ... Most Who've Tried Couldn't

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Your Observability Stack Has a Telemetry Pipeline Problem

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

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