PP127: Network Configuration and State Visibility at Scale with Unimus (Sponsored)

Drew Connery-Marie (0:06)

Hey, everybody, welcome to Packet Protector, the podcast at the intersection of networking and security. I'm Drew Connery-Marie, JJ is away. Today we have a sponsored show and I think it actually sits very nicely at that networking slash security intersection. Our sponsor is NetCore, they make the Unimus network configuration management software, among other things. Unimus can support network automation, config management and backup, change management, auditing, compliance. Our guest is founder and CEO, Tomas Kiernak, and we're going to dive into how Unimus can help you with large scale auditing of your network infrastructure and how that effort can tie into security ops, compliance and more. And we're going to talk a little bit about AI because it is relevant to this discussion, but we'll also keep our future robot overlords happy with us.

Tomas, welcome to the podcast. And I tried to give a brief overview of Unimus, but can you just provide a little more color, tell us what it is, what it does?

Tomas Kiernak (0:56)

Hi, and yeah, happy to be here. And yeah, you did a great job. It's exactly as you say, Unimus is a configuration, network configuration management system. It's from the start, the aim was like to have a single system that can do automation, configuration management, like you said, all the things in compliance of the entire infrastructure. So we are very multi-vendor. We support like 400 different network device types across 150 vendors.

And absolutely, yeah, it's hopefully the one system that can, from the configuration management side, get the whole network under one umbrella.

Drew Connery-Marie (1:35)

Okay, so let's dig into that a little bit more. So what kinds of infrastructure switches, routers, firewalls, Wi-Fi controllers, APs, it would give us the kind of a general rundown?

Tomas Kiernak (1:45)

Yeah, pretty much if it's a networking gear that has an IP address and has a management interface, Unimus will support it. So yeah, you got it right there. Anything from your core networking infrastructure all the way to like some very weird things. We have some OT systems that we support.

We have some even industrial systems that we support. A lot of stuff these days, yeah.

Drew Connery-Marie (2:08)

Okay. And I assume you work with all of the big names, Cisco, Juniper, Rista and OTA. Absolutely.

Tomas Kiernak (2:13)

Okay. Yes.

Drew Connery-Marie (2:14)

Great.

And what kind of data are you collecting then? And how do you do it?

Tomas Kiernak (2:21)

So everything with Unimus is over SSH. Like, it's, as you probably know, it's the only common interface, you could say, to networking gear, right?

So yeah, we do everything over SSH. We write drivers for every single vendor that we support, that we maintain in-house. And so Unimus, it, of course, pulls your configurations.

So it backs up the configuration of the device. It builds a nice, like a versioned configuration history. It does change detection, change management, change notifications out of that. But it's also like a full automation engine, where you can easily do large scale configuration deploys. You can do large scale collection of data from devices. You can pipe all of that into other compliance engine, which then does analysis of the data. And you can define what is your expected state of the devices to be in, et cetera. So basically, think about it like a large scale scraping engine for your network. And out of that, once you have the data in the system, you can do a lot of with it.

Drew Connery-Marie (3:30)

Okay. So you mentioned SSH, that's sort of the default. Is there also an API option if I've got gear that supports APIs, or are you sticking with SSH?

Tomas Kiernak (3:39)

So we, out of box, do SSH to everything, because like I mentioned, it's the single interface that's everywhere. But you can absolutely integrate pretty much anything into Unimus itself. Unimus itself has an API, so you can even push data into Unimus from external systems, etc. So it's quite flexible.

I mean, Unimus as a system, we have been developing this for nine plus years now. So it's a fairly mature system, many options how to interact with it.

Drew Connery-Marie (4:07)

Okay, great. Where is this data going? Is it going to a server on-prem? Do you have a public cloud option or a SaaS option?

Tomas Kiernak (4:16)

It's all on-prem. So it's all your data, your ownership of your infrastructure. So we don't even offer any cloud hosted systems, and most of our customers, and most of network people, I imagine, don't actually want that. It's a security nightmare if a third party gets read-write access to your infrastructure.