ipSpace.net » Building Network Automation Solutions » Easy Wins

Let’s start with some easy wins that require read-only access to network devices and no data model apart from inventory of devices.

We’ll gather device facts through SNMP and generate software version reports, continue with gathering IP addresses and generating list of subnets configured in our network, collect ARP and MAC tables to build a comprehensive list of hosts visible in your network, and conclude with a simple validation script that will report devices with outdated software version.

You will be able to get the job done with information-gathering modules available in standard Ansible distribution (starting with version 2.2), the daredevils will use NAPALM or other third-party Ansible libraries.

Hands-on Exercises

You’ll be able to choose among these hands-on assignments:

• Create a device health report (CPU utilization, memory utilization…);
• Collect hardware inventory
• Collect ARP tables and create a list of hosts in each subnet
• Collect CDP/LLDP, OSPF or BGP neighbors and build a network topology diagram (requires Graphviz or Gephi)
• Collect device IP addresses and create DNS zone files

Guest Speakers

Dinesh Dutt, the guest speaker in September 2017 course, explained why we need new tools to supplant existing network troubleshooting tools, and described the new technologies and tools being developed. He concluded his presentation with a deep dive into NetQ, the tool Dinesh had been working on for over a year.

DescriptionOutlineMaterialsExercises