Meraki

One of the features that I find myself using periodically that I think is underrated as far as using GraphQL is its ability to alias return keys in the response. This can be extremely helpful for developers writing applications, as it allows them to have the API response with the keys they are looking for. I have found this feature particularly useful when working on applications like Meraki and Nautobot together. In Nautobot a place is typically defined as the key site. In the Meraki world this is commonly set up as a network. Without GraphQL’s alias feature, the developer would need to translate this data over.

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.