Gain insights into automating network reconnaissance, orchestrating repetitive changes, and transforming network configuration management. Discover CI/CD pipeline migration for full network automation.

ansibleFinal1.tar.gz

gitjob

CIPhosts

CIPhosts-copy

gather_info

gather_important_facts

facts_to_md

facts_to_csv_html

tools

frr01

frr02

first_gather_important_facts

​​Network automation begins with automating network reconnaissance. This is accomplished by gathering important information from network devices while building a library of dynamic on-demand utilities and generating living documentation. Starting small, the course exhibits the simplicity and elegance of network automation.

Next, you will learn how to automate larger changes that require a high number of repetitive steps. These changes will be executed serially in a specific orchestrated order, making them perfect for an automated solution. After gaining comfort with the new tools, you can fully transform network configuration management to an automated, intent-based, self-documenting system.

The final step is learning how to migrate to a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, thereby fully automating the network.

Automate Your Network

In the previous hands-on lesson, we learned how to use Ansible to gather all (or subset of) facts about our devices and output them all.

In this lesson, we will see how to only output some important facts about the device.

# Running the playbook

We have already seen how we can gather information about our devices using Ansible and output them to the console.

In the example below, we have three devices on our network: `PC1`, `PC2`, and `PC3` grouped under the `PCs`. We will use Ansible to gather facts about these devices.


Running the widget at the end of the lesson will automatically run the following command:
```
ansible-playbook important_facts.yml
```
This will run the `important_facts.yml` playbook for all devices in the PCs group. This time, instead of outputting all the facts to the console, it will only output the specific facts listed under the `msg` parameter.  


To limit the output to just a single device, we can add the `--limit` flag and provide the IPv4 address of the device we want to single out. 

We can get the IPv4 addresses of our devices by using:
```
cat /etc/ansible/hosts
```

An example of running the playbook with the `--limit` flag is as follows:
```bash
ansible-playbook important_facts.yml --limit 172.20.20.2
```

<br>

> If we want to modify and re-run the playbooks, we may use a console-based text editor (Vim, nano) in the terminal window, then re-issue the `ansible-playbook` command. If you modify the playbooks in the widget's graphical editor, press **"Run"** to update the underlying container with your updated file(s).

Try it out in the widget below:

Get some hands-on experience with Ansible playbooks and use them to output only the important facts about a device.

Introduction

What Is Network Automation?

Why Automate the Network?

How to Automate the Network

Where to Start with Network Automation

Repository Structure

Network Reconnaissance

Tactical Playbooks

Data Models and Dynamic Templates

Dynamic Intent-Based Documentation

Configuration Management

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery

Conclusion

Hands-On: Important Facts