netbox

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. This post was created when NetBox was an open source project used often in my automation framework.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 post was created when NetBox was an open source project used often in my automation framework. I have moved on to using Nautobot due to the project vision and providing a methodology that will drive network automation forward further.

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.

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.