Skip to content

Adrian Giacometti

  • Home
  • Useful links
  • About Me

How Cisco ACI can easily send real-time notifications straight to your hands

11th June 2020 by Adrian Giacometti

Even if you don’t fully understand what is an API, it is really easy to leverage their power to have some useful information directly sent to a collaboration platform and receive it on your mobile or PC in real-time.

All the tools in use are Free: Python, Slack, and WebEx Teams.

In this post, I will show you how to send Cisco ACI faults and events to messages straight to Slack and WebEx Teams.

With a Python script, we are going to subscribe to the ACI faults and events channel. Then when ACI has a new message it will send it back to the script, and the script will send that message to a collaboration platform like Slack or WebEx Teams. We could also be doing any other kind of action with that information.

Here in the first example, you can see how a fault will be seen on your PC, Cell Phone, or tablet, which means … anywhere anytime!

Later if you add some chatBots you could easily take some action on these messages, forward them to support, start a voice call on the same chat, or even have them searchable for a future reference. Check my other posts about chatBots.

@Cisco WebEx Teams:

@Slack:

For the next one, I will upload a full tenant config to the APIC. You can see the EPGs creation events, and at the end, a fault because one of the interfaces does not exist. (I’m using the Cisco ACI Sandbox).

@Cisco WebEx Teams:

@Slack:

Check the code at GitHub.

Now, this script is running on a server, and the Cisco ACI APIC, allows you to deploy the script inside a small Docker container directly in the APIC. This is awesome because you are avoiding the need of a server to run the script, and we can say that the APIC is sending the message directly to you and without the need for any intermediary monitoring system.

Stop 2 seconds, and think about this… The Cisco ACI API is just another API, we could be using Firepower API, AWS API, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, and so on. Even with Slack and WebEx Teams, we are using their APIs. Since all the APIs follow the same structures and methods, if you learn just a bit about how to “talk” to them, you will be able to “talk” with all of them, and in some time, make them “talk” to each other. Which is, in fact, what are we doing here, with some Python code perform a GET from an API for some info, and POST that info into another API. So many new possibilities right?

I hope you enjoyed reading. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you need any help!

Have a good day, Adrián.-

Share on Social Media
linkedin twitter email

Post navigation

Previous Post:

Free Local Network backup with GUI and messaging

Next Post:

Cloud migration in 8 minutes: security rules from on-premise Cisco ACI to Oracle Cloud OCI with Terraform

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Translate to your language

Site search

Tags

ansible automation aws bcp bgp books chatbot chatops cisco cisco aci cloud automation datacenter desing devops drp enterprise f5 fastapi free gitlab ci gitops high availability internet iproute2 isp learning linux monitoring nat netdevops netmiko netops network network automation network backup opensource oracle oci python saltstack slack slackops terraform vpn vrf webinar

Blog Stats

  • 13,367 hits

RSS ipSpace.net Blog Posts

  • Video: Packet Buffers in Data Center ASICs
  • Will ChatGPT Replace Stack Overflow?
  • New: CI/CD in Networking Resource Page
  • External Links on Spine Switches
  • Test VRF-Aware DHCP Relaying with netlab

RSS Unknown Feed

Archives

  • 2021 (10)
    • November (1)
    • August (2)
    • July (1)
    • May (2)
    • April (3)
    • February (1)
  • 2020 (15)
    • December (2)
    • October (1)
    • September (1)
    • June (1)
    • April (5)
    • March (1)
    • February (2)
    • January (2)
  • 2019 (3)
    • December (3)

Follow & Contact info

  • LinkedIn
  • GitHub
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Email
  • RSS Feed

Subscribe to stay updated

Loading
© 2023 Adrian Giacometti