Continuing with the development of my previous post where we made a very simple and complete solution for local network device configuration backups, including alerts via Slack or email. Now we are going to do some modifications to have a free complete GUI and messaging for Cloud Network configuration backups including the history, comments, and actionable buttons. In the end you will be a simple click away to a full online historic track of all the configuration changes, including comments per line of changed code. Take a look at this short video! ...

Ansible es la plataforma de automatización más adoptada en IT. Esto se debe a que podes utilizarlo sobre prácticamente todos los sistemas operativos Windows, Linux, Redes, etc. Si te podes conectar remotamente al sistema entonces seguramente puedas utilizar Ansible. Y ademas no necesitas instalar un agente en los equipos remotos! Ansible es un producto de RedHat, asique cuenta con un buen desarrollo y soporte, muy buena documentación, y ademas es Open Source, es decir, es gratis, y todos pueden leer y colaborar con el código. ...

Now we are talking about Infrastructure Analytics. Elastic is a tool that can ingest any (and I mean it, any!) kind of information from multiple sources, correlate them all together, and create some beautiful and fully customizable dashboards. To give you an idea of what you can achieve, I will show a couple of use cases that I discovered while exploring the tool. Automation chatbots code insights While doing integration tests of my chatbot automation project and going through logs manually, I found that it just didn’t scale and was inefficient in time and precision. ...

Start using Ansible Vault is pretty easy. As usual, there is no magic here, you keep the key in mind or a file somewhere. If you keep it in mind doesn’t sound very practical because you are trying to automate tasks without human intervention and either way you don’t want to type that long key each time. (You can use this method for any kind of file, Ansible or not, for a picture is you like.) ...

I’ve been asked about how to automate a network configuration backup and I read a lot of articles on the internet, but I didn’t find a simple, quick, complete and free setup. So, I made this one. You only need a Linux with Python3 (installed by default) check your version with: $ python3 --version or easy upgradable with: $ python3 --version $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install python3.6 and Ansible, very easy to install. ...

Automation Bots can help IT operations teams day-to-day work, and enhance the interaction between customers and IT members in a standard, fast, and secure way. (Check the use cases from my previous posts, and new ones to come.) Just keep it simple! That’s the key to also enable easy adoption, a low learning curve, easy operability, and maintainability. Let’s talk about those concepts. Cheap: the software is Open Source: Linux, Python, Ansible, Salt, and Slack (not Open Source but with a free account is enough). So it’s better than cheap, it’s free. I will talk more about this later. ...

Find out how you can tremendously simplify IT support no matter where or when. Using an always online Bot per technology now is simple, straightforward and free. You can even chat with it from your cell phone. Continuing with this saga of posts. Now let’s dive into deep technical use cases. I will do it from a networking perspective just because it’s my main field of knowledge, but since Ansible and Salt are multiplatform, the following use cases are multi-platform in a single playbook. ...

You don’t need a big budget to look smart and efficient. ChatOps and automation bots is easier than you tought. For who? This post could be helpful to any kind company and size: IT related and non-IT related, service provider, from small to large, the scenario is the same. The big difference with medium to large companies is that they have bigger budgets, and in this case, having the technology available to do this, do not actually involve big budgets, because it is free, it’s out there, it’s Open Source. What you need to invest is just a bit in coding/service to adapt the software to your needs. It is not rocket science. I am going to show some basic things here in this post, and after it is only about “train/code” your bot by adding functionalities as times goes on. ...

This is getting extremely fun. After doing some testing with Ansible and Salt, the new integrant of the Netor family is Slack. Yes, a chat platform, and I am going to show how much this can add to the game. By adding some Python to parse the inputs and outputs from Slack and Ansible, it is possible to achieve some super practical things. But wait, let’s first establish some basic concepts in this first part of the post, and then we will go to the good stuff in the next post. ...

Going into these new topics was one of the best decisions of the last years. It is an exciting and almost uncharted world. There is an ecosystem of applications succeeding in the servers world, while networking is going behind but still very encouraged. It is hard to think about the use cases without the tendency of self-making it too difficult. But starting with small things made me realize that the opposite way is the right way. No company is the same, not a single context is the same, so the point of view and development is always individualized. Start with small automation, and it will grow as time passes by. ...