Dear friend, This year I had a pleasure and privilege to attend KubeCon Europe 2023 and this was the first time I’ve heard about MicroK8s. That sounded interesting and I decided I shall experiment with it and write a blogpost; but it didn’t catch my attention to a degree that I put it on top of my list; instead, I’ve put it to back burner. The last week I was talking to a colleagues of mine, who told me that he needs to test something in his production Kubernetes at home. I was quite interested, what does the one mean by “production Kubernetes cluster at home” and it appeared to be MikroK8s. A ..read more

Dear friend, Today’s topic will be an unusual one. We will talk about some (of course) Python-related technology, which despite its existence for quite a while already, we have been always somewhat avoiding. It always seemed for me that Jupyter is not a right thing for network automation, especially when we talk proper software development, not simple scripts. I still stand this ground; however, I see now where Jupyter can be quite useful. Is There Any Limit in Network Automation Tools? Well. The truth is that there is no limit. In vast majority of cases, tools used in Network Automation are e ..read more

Dear friend, Awareness of what is happening in your IT infrastructure (in our case, in network) is a key success or failure factor of any modern business, as huge majority of businesses are now running online. The awareness is built on top of visibility of network events and activities happening in the network, which in their turn reflects in data points, which can be collected. In this blogpost we’ll cover how these data points can be collected in multi vendor network running Cisco IOS XR, Nokia SR OS and Arista EOS switches using Prometheus, which is one of the most popular monitoring platfo ..read more

Dear friend, We hope you are doing great and had a nice time over the festive period to recharge your batteries towards the new year. We wish it to be successful, productive and prosperous. With this, let’s dive into the topic of today’s blog, which is network automation for OCP SONiC with GNMI and Python over pyGNMI. 1 2 3 4 5 No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the prior permission of the author ..read more

Dear friend, Today we’ll look into a question, which is raising quite often on various meetups related to network automation or various threads that is the addition of any automation components (say, NetBox) to the existing networking managing suit, where you already have some inventory (say, LibreNMS). We’ll take a look into multiple approaches and, as usual, will share some code snippets how you can do that. 1 2 3 4 5 No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, record ..read more

Hello my friend, Are you looking for building network automation at scale leveraging the future-proof model-driven network automation? Besides attending our zero-to-hero network automation training and network automation with nornir, we suggest you to take a look at nornir_pygnmi, the new plugin we have created for Nornir to simplify management of network devices with gNMI. 1 2 3 4 5 No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise, for commercial pur ..read more

Hello my friend, Monitoring is a key component of any IT and network systems, as it gives us possibility to know what is going on in those systems. That is important at least for two reasons: Observing actual status of the system counters Analyze trends over the time period Let’s see how we can attempt to normalize collection of such a data with Prometheus from dis-aggregated network switches empowered by Linux. 1 2 3 4 5 No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, re ..read more

Hello my friend, When I booted up my laptop in the morning I was aiming to write something simple and easy: it is a summer and I don’t want to spend the whole Sunday on writing a blogpost. However, the topic, which is supposed to be an easy ride, appeared to be a bit more complicated. Well, it is even better then, as the official documentation to the topic is unfortunately vague. 1 2 3 4 5 No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise, for commerci ..read more

Hello my friend, yes, we are nerds. Despite the Christmas holidays we continue working and delivering value. After all, Guido von Rossum has created Python over Christmas holidays. We find that very inspiring to be honest and, therefore, decided to look into something appealing as well. 1 2 3 4 5 No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the prior permission of the author. How to automate the automation ..read more

Hello my friend, All of us (definitely me, at least) are always thrilled hearing news from network vendors on their implementation of model-driven interfaces for network management. Having spent years automating network devices in a text-based paradigm (i.e., from CLI-based automation to full fledged configuration rendering with a replacement), I’m a firm believer that model-driven approach based on YANG modules and protocols such as GNMI, NETCONF, and RESTCONF, is a proper way to go. Recently we disclosed the development we are doing in terms of network topology visualization with DANT. And t ..read more