Network-Automation

Once NetDevOps becomes a part of your DNA, you will surely have some code or techniques to mix again and create new features that will significantly enhance your operations, just like this one. On this occasion, the image speak for itself. Every week, I receive a detailed report and a Jira ticket outlining necessary fixes for any deviations. This allows me to monitor the overall status, prioritize the top 10 deviations in each category, and track their progress over time. We’re just beginning with this methodology, but our aim is to expand it by adding more checks and sites. ...

Not so long ago a customer asked me for help on how to block IP addresses on their regional firewalls infrastructure. They needed a solution urgently, since lately there were some severe attacks on other companies in the region, and they didn’t want to be “on the news” too. Having a network engineer available 7x24 to block IP addresses on all the firewalls is not timewise efficient nor effective. It is simply not realistic to get him to work at any time (like midnight) and configure everything in less than 1 hour without errors and back and forths while chatting in the middle of the crisis with the rest of the organization. ...

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. ...

In my previous post, I showed you how easy it is to have a network configuration backup with a GUI and messaging and keep it synchronized with GitHub to see the changes, and also sending messages to Slack and emails when it runs. For this post, I modified the scripts to use a cool Open Source tool named Gogs (Thanks Nikolay Ryzhkov for bringing this tool to my attention). With Gogs you will have a local repository system with the same functionalities as GitHub, so you don’t need to worry about sending your configs outside of your own infrastructure. ...

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! ...

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. ...