Networking, Automation, Infrastructure as code, Telemetry
Managing hundreds of devices with your monitoring system might be a tedious task, especially when using GUI based device onboarding. But why not let your config management tool of choice take care of it? This blog post is about a declarative Ansible playbook to generate Telegraf configuration files leveraging the inputs.ping plugin and populate a Grafana World Map.
Continue reading “Automate your NOC World Map at scale”
Tired of scrolling through massive directories on a file server, flooded with config files? Easy to implement ‘backup’ solution at day one (IOS archive?), but often based on debatable, unreliable protocols like TFTP, combined with great challenges in tracking changes on day two.
Continue reading “Configbackup with Ansible + Git”
So, your lab is set up and waiting for something meaningful to do?
This post introduces the two probably most commonly used networking modules in the Cisco IOS world – it’s no rocket science to use other vendors’ modules in the same way, by the way. IOS_command executes, well, commands at the privileged level, while IOS_config is used in config mode – no surprise there, right?
Depending on your personal background there are many different ways to approach networks or (more general) infrastructure devices in a programmatic way. If you are blessed with sufficient coding skills, please go straight to Python and frameworks like Nornir to get things started. This post though is for long time network engineers with little or no software experience.
Continue reading “How should I start a network automation journey ?”
Well, I might know what you think. Despite all the successful automation efforts in other areas of IT, networking is kind of special – not only because of the massive blast radius if Murphy strikes. Being a seasoned enterprise professional you also know how ‘fast’ change really happens and that most internal computer and networking problems need to be approached at the people and process level, rather than throwing a piece of technology at it.
After all, box-by-box configuration backed up by occasional scripts or template one-offs has worked for decades now…
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