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One of the best features of Nautobot as a Network Automation Platform is the ability to create your own custom code. This is executed via a job. What makes Nautobot unique is its ability to integrate with a Git repository to get those jobs and code for use into Nautobot. This provides perhaps the simplest, authenticated, and logged methodology for building your own API endpoints.

Nautobot supplies an API endpoint to start execution of jobs. The big deal about why you would want to do this inside of Nautobot (even if you do not have any other data inside of Nautobot, but you should add data, it is a perk) is that you get an authentication mechanism with the Nautobot token setup and a logging mechanism. With Nautobot user accounts you can create tokens that will handle the API authentication. This is helpful that you do not need to add that into your own Flask, FastAPI, or Django application yourself. This is the same for the logging mechanism. Every job execution provides a log of the execution and the result.

Earlier this month I was able to hit the publish button on a new book - Open Source Network Management. The book dives into getting started with several open source network management tools. It is meant as a guide to help further your experience with using and installing open source tools, all on a single VM/host. The size of the host is meant to have minimal capital investment, in the way of a single NUC or a minimal VM deployed on a hypervisor in your environment.

All of the work through the modules thus far in the series have brought us to what we all want to see. How to get or update device information inside of Nautobot. Adding of sites, device types, device roles are required to get us to this point. Now you can see how to add a device to Nautobot using the networktocode.nautobot.device module.

There are many optional parameters for the module specifically. I encourage you to take a look at the module documentation (linked below) in order to get a good sense of all of the options available. The required parameters for a device that is present are:

• device_role
• device_type
• name
• site
• status

An important caveat for me is that this is something that should be done with rarity. Only when truly adding a device to Nautobot, in a programmatic way this should be used. I do not advocate for running this module constantly based on your devices. The idea is to get Nautobot to be your source of truth about devices, not to have devices be the source of truth and updating Nautobot.

So where do I see this being run? I do absolutely see it being a part of a pipeline or a service portal. The idea being that the service portal has a request for a new site to be turned up. That in turn kicks off an Ansible Playbook that will make the necessary updates to Nautobot, and is done in a consistent manor.

A device type is the next piece in the Nautobot Device onboarding requirements. The device type corresponds to the model number of the hardware (or virtual machine). This is where you are able to template out devices during their creation. So if you have a console port on a device type, that console port will be created when you create the device. However, there is NOT a relationship built between the device type and the device. If the device type gets updated after the device is created, the device itself is not updated.

Platforms are an optional item when adding devices into Nautobot. The platform is the OS that you are going to be using. Most often this is used to help identify which driver your automation platform is going to be using. Specifically the slug of the platform is what needs to match. So in the terms of Ansible (since we are using Ansible to populate Nautobot), you will want to set Cisco IOS devices to ios. By having the slug match the automation platform name you have that information in your inventory. For these reasons I strongly recommend setting the Platform for devices.

Adding your manufacturers via code is the easy way to get started with your Nautobot devices. Immediately after adding Sites, the next thing to get going when using Nautobot as your Source of Truth is to add in Manufacturers. These are just that, who makes the gear that you use. For this demonstration you will see adding just a few manufacturers. I’m not necessarily picking on any vendors and who should or shouldn’t be here. It is just what my background brings.

A device role is aptly named, the role of the device. This is likely to be something that is meaningful to your organization and could change. For example you may have the 3 tier system of Core, Distribution, and Access layer environments. These are just fine. So you would want to have the roles there to reflect this reality. You may have leaf-spine environments, there are two more roles. And in my past I have also had roles that would indicate that there are dedicated DMZ, WAN edge, Internet edge devices. So this is the place to set this.

This post dives into the Nautobot Ansible Content Collection sites module to create/update a Site. This series for the beginning will be a clone of what I had done previously with NetBox. So some of the language will be very similar.

When it comes to creating and deleting sites in Nautobot, the question of should I be using Ansible to do this? In my opinion this is a yes it should be. Most likely an IT tool is not the tool that will be the Source of Truth as it comes to physical sites involved in an organization. So this module in particular that should be looked at and put into production use with Ansible.

This is the first post as I shift into taking a closer look at the Nautobot Ansible Collection. The collection includes many of the needed modules to effectively manage your Nautobot environment. If This will take a deeper dive into several of the components of the inventory plugin, but not all of the options. The documentation for all of the collection can be found at:

• ReadTheDocs: https://nautobot-ansible.readthedocs.io
• Galaxy Page: https://galaxy.ansible.com/networktocode/nautobot

This post is going to give information on how to install the collection as it may be applicable to every post in the series (as they get posted).

If you were a user of the NetBox Ansible Collection previously, you will notice a few differences. The first big difference in the modules is that there is no preface of nautobot_ before each module. Since this Collection is developed after Ansible 2.10 they are using the FQCN (Fully Qualified Collection Name), there is no longer the need to prefix the name to the module name. So where there was a netbox_device before it will now be just device, underneath the FQCN of networktocode.nautobot.device as an example.

All of the work through the modules thus far in the series have brought us to what we all want to see. How to get or update device information inside of NetBox. Adding of sites, device types, device roles are required to get us to this point. Now you can see how to add a device to NetBox using the netbox.netbox.netbox_device module.

A device type is the next piece in the NetBox Device onboarding requirements. The device type corresponds to the model number of the hardware (or virtual machine). This is where you are able to template out devices during their creation. So if you have a console port on a device type, that console port will be created when you create the device. However, there is NOT a relationship built between the device type and the device. If the device type gets updated after the device is created, the device itself is not updated.

A device role is aptly named, the role of the device. This is likely to be something that is meaningful to your organization and could change. For example you may have the 3 tier system of Core, Distribution, and Access layer environments. These are just fine. So you would want to have the roles there to reflect this reality. You may have leaf-spine environments, there are two more roles. And in my past I have also had roles that would indicate that there are dedicated DMZ, WAN edge, Internet edge devices. So this is the place to set this.

Platforms are an optional item when adding devices into NetBox. The platform is the OS that you are going to be using. Most often this is used to help identify which driver your automation platform is going to be using. Specifically the slug of the platform is what needs to match. So in the terms of Ansible (since we are using Ansible to populate NetBox), you will want to set Cisco IOS devices to ios. By having the slug match the automation platform name you have that information in your inventory. For these reasons I strongly recommend setting the Platform for devices.

Adding your manufacturers via code is the easy way to get started with your NetBox devices. Immediately after adding Sites, the next thing to get going when using NetBox as your Source of Truth is to add in Manufacturers. These are just that, who makes the gear that you use. For this demonstration you will see adding just a few manufacturers. I’m not necessarily picking on any vendors and who should or shouldn’t be here. It is just what my background brings.

This post dives into the NetBox Ansible Content Collection module to create/update a Site. As I start into this series on looking at the modules that create/update/delete data from NetBox, the question that I keep asking myself is should I be looking at the modules that are creating/updating/deleting items? The reason that I ask this to myself is because I am a firm believer that automation should be coming from NetBox as its Source of Truth (SoT). You can hear/read plenty more about these thoughts on posts and videos here:

• Minneapolis Ansible Meetup April 2020 Talk
• Ansible Guest Blog Post

The NetBox lookup plugin is to get information out of NetBox for use within Ansible. This uses pynetbox to query the NetBox API for the information requested. On top of being helpful in gathering data from NetBox (when it is not your inventory source), but it is extremely helpful in larger NetBox deployments when compared to using the URI module as well. If you wish to use NetBox as your inventory source, you should definitely read my previous post on getting started with the NetBox Inventory Plugin.

The documentation can be found on ReadTheDocs. This is going to be starting out with the basics of the plugin and getting some sample output and to show how to form groups to be used.

This is the first post as I start to look at the NetBox Ansible Collection. This is an impressive collection with modules for several of the NetBox applications, a query plugin, and an inventory plugin. This will take a deeper dive into several of the components of the inventory plugin, but not all of the options. The documentation for all of the collection can be found at:

• ReadTheDocs: https://netbox-ansible-collection.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
• Galaxy Page: https://galaxy.ansible.com/netbox/netbox

Recently I had some discussions with Nick Russo on some URL redirection changes he was making for his content. I’m not going to take any of his thunder of what he is doing, and that is quite awesome. I decided that I wanted to take a look at that as well within my domain/blog using the Jekyll approach. This is going to be my short post regarding the steps I took to add the URL redirection setup to my personal blog page - josh-v.com.

This originates from a conversation had on Twitter about how to get the IP Prefix information from an IPAM tool, specifically NetBox using Ansible. There are a couple of methodologies to go through, and I had originally started down the path of using the URI module. Which could be done. The more elegant solution is to use the NetBox Ansible Collections to handle the logic for you! Let’s take a look.

Thank you to @ttl255 for the inspiration to the journey with the Collection!