Network engineers tell me that their teams are chronically understaffed. This is partially a labor market issue, given that 52% of IT organizations recently told Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) that they’re struggling to hire networking pros. But it’s also a business decision. Over-hiring in the wake of the pandemic led to a wave of layoffs, and now IT executives are gun-shy about repeating the same pattern. Instead, they tell their network teams to find ways to operate with fewer resources. In fact, 43% of IT pros say personnel shortages is a top network operations challenge.

With network operations centers (NOC) and network engineering teams understaffed, many organizations want to automate Day 2 operations —monitoring, troubleshooting, change management — as much as possible. 

Of course, there are business drivers for automation, too. Network teams want to accelerate mean time to repair, which is a key measure of operational effectiveness today. They also want to improve overall network experience. 

Day 2 NetOps automation is a strategic priority

Some 79% of 352 IT pros indicated that automation of Day 2 network operations is a high to very high priority (based on findings in EMA’s new research report, Network Management Megatrends 2026: Automation, Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Networks, and AI Transformation).

“We’re looking at making processes more and more efficient and more and more automated to do more with less people,” a network observability architect with a Fortune 500 entertainment company recently told me. “We’re using automation and AI, and a lot of that falls on the monitoring platform engineers who are responsible for tooling.”

Automation of Day 2 network operations is not a novel concept. For years, network teams have configured their tools and procedures to trigger custom scripts and playbooks to fix recurring problems. Network tool vendors have embedded more and more automation into their products to drive more scalable and reliable automation.

However, the emergence of AI has presented a bigger opportunity for automation. Sixty-two percent of IT organizations plan to use AI-driven and agentic network management capabilities to drive higher levels of automation.

“We’re working on a platform to create some custom agents and test them and guide them to do some automated responses based on what the issue is, basically replacing what the NOC engineer does,” said a network tools lead with a Fortune 500 retailer.

Every major network infrastructure vendor (Arista, Cisco, HPE, and Extreme) offers some level of AI-driven automation of Day 2 operations in their management platforms. EMA estimates that at least half of network observability vendors are also delivering AI-driven automation, too. More will follow.

Barriers to Day 2 network automation

Not every organization will succeed with these automation efforts. The biggest barrier to success is also a key driver of automation adoption. Forty-six percent of IT pros say skills gaps on the network team are preventing them from automating Day 2 operations. This makes sense for network teams that rely on scripts and runbooks. Those kinds of solutions require internal resources who have the time to create them.

But adoption of vendors’ automation solutions, whether AI-driven or not, also require internal resources. Someone has to evaluate, purchase, implement, and support such tools. Under-resourced teams will struggle to execute. Quite often implementation teams only get basic functionality implemented before they are forced to tackle another project. The advanced features that drive automation are never implemented.

The top secondary challenges to Day 2 automation are tool limitations (36%), data quality and visibility issues (32%), and risk aversion or governance constraints (32%). Many network teams are locked in with tools that lack the AI and automation features they need. Others don’t trust their data enough to let AI and automation act on it. They’d rather verify things manually. And even with good tools and good data, many organizations simply can’t tolerate the risk of an inadvertent bad change.

Regardless of the challenges, the motivations and the means, network teams need to prioritize automation of Day 2 network operations. Network teams that make it a higher priority also tend to experience the most success with overall network operations strategy, according to EMA’s research. Upper management will need to get involved. Executive sponsorship and budget will be essential to push these automation efforts to the finish line.