ipSpace.net » Building Network Automation Solutions » Sample Network Automation Solutions

Network engineers attending the Building Network Automation Solutions online course created hundreds of solutions. Some of the more interesting or creative ones are collected on this page. You might also want to watch the Real-Life Automation Wins part of the Network Automation Use Case webinar.

Simple Reports

• Jaakko Rautanen created a report that identified which UPS systems failed during a prolonged power outage
• Ruben Tripiana measured end-to-end latency and created a summary report
• Steve Krause created transceiver alarm report based on reported SFP optical levels;
• Dirk Feldhaus created Cisco ACI configuration report
• Nadeem Lughmani collected information on switch stacks including the total number of ports in a stack and the number of available ports.
• Andreas Müller collected information from multiple platforms and created nice HTML reports.
• Stephen Harding created a Network Health State Report that collects numerous summary statistics from a data center fabric and compares them to expected values.

Network Diagrams

• James McCutcheon created VLAN troubleshooting diagrams
• Ben Roberts developed a full-blown solution showing the details of IP multicast distribution trees
• Chris Crook collected BGP neighbor data with Nornir and created a dynamic network diagram using d3-graphviz
• Erik Ruiter created a network diagram from LLDP neighbor data
• Paddy Kelly created L3VPN graphs detailing PE-to-CE connectivity using Cisco's pyATS to parse the Cisco IOS printouts. He also wrote a short article explaining the process.

Troubleshooting Scripts

• Eder Gernot wrote a Python script that discovers the switch and port that triggered the latest STP Topology Change Notification

Configuration Consistency

• Gabriel Sulbaran checked common configuration parameters on Fortinet firewalls
• Pavel Rovnov verified consistency of network management configuration parameters in a multi-vendor environment
• Hans Verkerk wrote a switch configuration analyzer and used it to gather data needed to perform several large-scale migration projects
• Daniel Macuare decided to automate lab setup for the CCNP TSHOOT course
• Erik Ruiter implemented consistent provisioning of network management parameters, port profiles and VLANs

Infrastructure or Service Deployment

• Hans Verkerk built a zero-touch-provisioning solution (Nornir version)
• Simon Bitterli automated equipment staging
• Nicky Davey automated large-scale DMVPN rollout
• David Varnum created a solution that deploys VXLAN/EVPN infrastructure, and layer-2 and layer-3 service in Arista EOS fabric
• Valter Milanese and Emanuele Ballarini automated VXLAN/EVPN deployment on Cisco Nexus switches, including pre- and post-deployment validation and error recovery with cleanup and configuration rollback.
• Stephen Harding started with a full-blown data center fabric solution based on minimalistic data model that is expanded on-the-fly with a dynamic inventory script, evolved it into one of the best data center fabric automation solutions I've seen, and documented it in a long series of must-read blog posts.
• Alex Cousins decided to use infrastructure- and service data models and used a makefile to create Ansible inventory files from centralized data models.
• Adrian Giacommetti migrated Cisco ACI tenant networking into Oracle cloud
• Noel Boulene used Terraform to automate provisioning of NSX-T firewall rules.

Multi-Platform Deployments

• Daniel Teycheney created a data model and templates to deploy BGP routing in multi-platform environment and a full-blown solution including configuration review, deployment and validation
• Chris Crook tried to deploy BGP routing using YANG data models on Cisco IOS, NX-OS, EOS and Junos.

Continuous Integration and Deployment

• Daniel Teycheney created a CI pipeline that validates Ansible playbooks before they're merged with the master branch.
• Donald Johnson checks data models before committing them into a Git-based repository

Complete Automation Solutions

• Francois Herbet developed MPLS/VPN deployment solution
• Stan Strijakov and his team fully automated site refresh procedures
• Dirk Feldhaus automated Cisco ACI tenant deployment

Even More Interesting Solutions

You might also want to check these solutions described by network automation course guest speakers:

• Mark Prior automated private cloud infrastructure deployment
• Thomas Wacker described how UBS automated large-scale data center rollout
• Nick Hilliard described IXP manager, an IXP orchestration and automation system.

More to Explore

• John Peek blogs about his automation projects