What Kind of Data Do You Need For Reliable AI & Automation?

In order to trust AI and automation, you must build on top of network data that is: Free of errors. Normalized across vendors. Contextualized by the dependencies between devices, apps, and services. Available on demand. IP Fabric’s network digital twin meets all the above requirements, so you can trust that your automated workflows and AI agents will be able to make reliable decisions.

Why Do I Need IP Fabric If I Already Have a CMDB or SoT?

Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) and Sources of Truth (SoTs) can discover the network using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), but have significant gaps in visibility. For example: CMDBs and SoTs can only discover certain vendors, so you could be missing 20-40% of your network. CMDBs and SoTs can’t reliably map Layer 2–Layer 3 topologies, which means they might miss IPSec tunnels, transparent firewalls, and other elements of network behavior. IP Fabric takes a different approach to network discovery by using Command Line Interface (CLI) and API calls to read device data. It then hops to neighboring devices until 100% of the network is found. The end result is an interactive digital twin of Layer 1–Layer 3 topologies across your on-prem and cloud environments. This digital twin can be used to automatically validate the contents of your CMDB and SoT, so that you can always trust the workflows that are built on top of them.

How Does IP Fabric’s MCP Server Work?

IP Fabric’s MCP server is built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard that lets any human or AI tool query your network data in natural language. Plug it in to any LLM, and aks for help with tasks like: Detecting & remediating compliance drift Accelerating troubleshooing & MTTR Running “what-if” simulations Correlating underlay & overlay analysis in SD-WAN environments Every response is informed by a complete, accurate, and vendor-neutral digital twin of your network’s behavior at that point in time.

What Automation Tools Does IP Fabric Integrate With?

IP Fabric has an open API, so it’s easy to share deterministic, vendor-neutral insights with any team, tool, or AI agent that needs them. Integrate with tools like Illumio, ServiceNow, NetBox, Nautobot, and Ansible via API, or expose validated network intelligence to any LLM via our enterprise-grade MCP server. IP Fabric doesn’t charge by the seat, so there’s no limit on how you share your network data.

How Does IP Fabric Handle MCP Security?

IP Fabric’s MCP server is shipped inside your local Virtual Machine (VM) so that you’re always in control of your own network data. You must explicitly opt in to use the MCP server.

Why Does IP Fabric Use Read-Only Access?

Read-only access is sufficient for IP Fabric to discover your cloud and network environments. IP Fabric also does not push any changes in your environment, so you can maintain a Separation of Duties (SoD) for proper governance.

AI & Automation

Govern a connected system of automation workflows using network data you can actually trust.

Transcript

Transcript: AI & Automation

IP fabric is a readonly digital twin
providing an evidence-grade data
foundation for AI and automation and
easily provides pre and post change
validation. IP fabric does not
automatically make changes which
provides the separation of duties
required for governance.
So, in this demo, we’re going to
actually jump to a self-service portal
that we created with Cloud Code and
several MCP servers, including uh IP
Fabric, of course. And what we’re going
to show here is just a a representation
of how our customers are doing their
automation practices with things like
self-service portals. So, I’m going to
jump into VLAN provisioning here and
just show some of the ways that IP
Fabric is really the foundation of the
the automation here. And so we’re going
to select a site. This information all
comes from IP fabric from the latest
snapshot. I’m going to say that I want
VLAN 100 on some of these switches. Um
the VLAN name should be ERP in this
case. And then again automatically we’re
given some uh IP ranges that we can use.
And maybe we’re just uh implementing
new micro scanners.
and we’ll put that it’s requested by
admin. So now we’re going to validate
this with IP fabric and actually netbox
and this this validation failed which
was expected. So IP fabric confirms that
VLAN 100 is not present in the current
network. We can actually jump into IP
fabric. This is that validation piece
that I was speaking about. So VLAN 100
is in fact there but it’s not at the
Helsinki site. So we’re we’re good
there. However, it is showing that we
are using VLAN 100 in Netbox, which
could mean a couple of things. Maybe
it’s stale data or maybe someone has
legitimately uh called Dibs on that uh
VLAN and so we can’t use it. So, we’ll
go ahead and we’ll say VLAN 101 is okay
and we’ll validate with IP fabric. So,
again, now we’ve validated everything.
We’re good to go and we can confirm and
think about provisioning. So what we’re
doing here because we can’t
automatically just um run changes right
we have to make requests to change
things. So um we have a netbox
validation here of course IP fabric has
a plugin with netbox and then we can
also automate uh population of a service
now or other um change management
ticket. So again this is all using
automation and templates. There’s no AI
in this, but I’ve been able to
automatically populate a risk at impact
analysis, a plan, a backout plan, which
includes IP Fabric’s config backup uh
capability, and a test plan. And then,
of course, we’ve created playbooks. So a
pre-change snapshot from IP fabric what
happened before the actual VLAN
provisioning using Ansible and then
again using Ansible we’ll create a
postchange snapshot that we can compare
to the pre-chain snapshot and make sure
everything is copacetic. IP fabric is a
trusted data source and governance layer
for AI and automation. Reach out to
learn more.

AI Agents Can’t Reason Over Fragmented Data

IP Fabric’s structured, end-to-end insights are the foundation for reliable AIOps and network automation. Use those insights to fuel every tool and AI agent in your cloud, network, and application stack.

If I had budget to buy only one product that would immediately benefit both network engineers and accelerate network automation projects, it would be IP Fabric.

Jeremy Schulman

Senior Director of AI Initiatives & Solution Engineering

@ Major League Baseball

Read Customer Story

Start With AI-Ready Data

IP Fabric’s application-aware digital twin is the key for getting real value from AI-driven operations. It’s 100% validated and vendor-neutral, so any human or AI agent can use it to make decisions without putting critical services at risk.

MCP server diagram showing how IP Fabric's MCP server fits in to a cycle of network intent, change fulfillment, and validation

Fuel Every Workflow With a Trusted Model

Integrate IP Fabric into automated any workflow via our open API model and enterprise-grade MCP server. Every team, tool, and AI agent can query your network in natural language—no extra licenses required.

Diagram showing how IP Fabric sits in the middle of a network tool ecosystem, in between AI tools, network automation tools, IT service management tools, network security tools, application performance monitoring tools, network configuration and change management tools, and more.

Govern With a Separation of Duties

Continuously validate that your automated workflows and AI agents are behaving as you intend them to. Use the MCP server to generate custom reports and timestamped evidence of compliance.