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First draft of At A Glance article - #53

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First draft of At A Glance article#53
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eenblam/19-enhancement-not-a-video-crash-course

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@eenblam

@eenblam eenblam commented Aug 7, 2026

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Here's my first pass at a draft of the "not a video" crash course.

The goal is provide a brief elevator pitch that's accessible to network operators, developers, managers, etc. People want to know what it is, what it does, and what it would look like to use it.

Some open questions for reviewers:

  • Where would this ideally live in the sidebar?
  • Do we want to call it "At A Glance"? Something else?
  • Is there additional content we want? Phrasing to change?

Closes #19

Suppose that we have nodes in Amsterdam and London, and we want to establish a core link between them.

On the Subscriptions page, we can see that we already have a subscription for each node, so we create a link via the New Subscription dropdown.
![Create Core Link dropdown](../img/at-a-glance/create_core_link_dropdown.png)

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Maybe we can look into a way to allow users to click on an image so it pops out into a larger version, in some kind of modal. Currently I can only read what's on the image by right clicking and opening it in a new tab, otherwise it's just a bit too small. (I'll have a look into plugins)

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#56 what do you think?

@Mark90 Mark90 left a comment

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Great start! Left some comments.

I'm also not sure yet where best to place this in the nav bar

We're then taken to a form for creating the new core link.
As seen below, the form is multi-part with choices pregenerated for the fields.

In this case, the choices are generated dynamically from a Netbox inventory, and all of this is easily implemented via backend Python code. No front-end form templates were required.

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easily

If the target audience is network engineers who have never written a line of Python, they might not agree. :)

Suppose that we have nodes in Amsterdam and London, and we want to establish a core link between them.

On the Subscriptions page, we can see that we already have a subscription for each node, so we create a link via the New Subscription dropdown.
![Create Core Link dropdown](../img/at-a-glance/create_core_link_dropdown.png)

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#56 what do you think?

# Additional Actions
Above, we saw the Actions available to manage a Core Link subscription after it was created.

`Modify core_link`: Users can define modify workflows to update the subscription database and/or an orchestrated external resource. Users define modify workflows for each subscription to facilitate changes mid-lifecycle.

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Might be useful to emphasize that it's possible to define one modify workflow with interactive decision making in the form to decide what to actually modify, or to split it up over multiple smaller scoped modify workflows?

Edit: I see you already did this more or less towards the bottom of this section


`Modify core_link`: Users can define modify workflows to update the subscription database and/or an orchestrated external resource. Users define modify workflows for each subscription to facilitate changes mid-lifecycle.

`Validate core_link`: Users can define validation workflows to verify the data in the WFO database against the external systems it manages. An error in a validation workflow places the corresponding subscription in an Out of Sync state, which flags it for remediation and blocks its workflows. For example, if WFO manages a resource in Netbox and that resource is then edited directly in Netbox, this could be detected with a validation workflow.

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Screenshot of this might be nice :)


`Validate core_link`: Users can define validation workflows to verify the data in the WFO database against the external systems it manages. An error in a validation workflow places the corresponding subscription in an Out of Sync state, which flags it for remediation and blocks its workflows. For example, if WFO manages a resource in Netbox and that resource is then edited directly in Netbox, this could be detected with a validation workflow.

Validation workflows are commonly run overnight using WFO's [scheduling](../../orchestrator-core/guides/tasks/) features.

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Maybe add "But schedules can be customized to run at any other time or frequency"

Comment on lines +67 to +72
# Behind the Scenes

So what's actually happening behind the scenes when we run these workflows?

WFO provides none of the facilities for talking to Netbox, NSO, Ansible, etc.
These features are implemented by other packages or by the software team leveraging the framework.

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This section could probably be expanded a little more

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[Enhancement]: "Not a Video" crash course

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