With the release of Nautobot 2.1.9 and 1.6.16 came new requirements for pynautobot to include an authentication token that for some initial calls that were not previously required. So to make sure that pynautobot (and subsequently Nautobot Ansible) and Nautobot Helm Chart work with the most recent version of Nautobot, new versions have been released ..read more

At Network to Code, we are continually working on new solutions to extend automation capabilities for our customers. One project that I recently worked on used Event-Driven Ansible, or EDA, to simplify the process of automating other systems based on changes in Nautobot. This blog post will cover the basics of EDA, and how we used it to update ServiceNow CMDB records based on changes in Nautobot ..read more

of this series we looked at macros and filters with Jinja2 templating. Now it’s time to ramp it up to the next level and look at something a little bit more like what you would see in the real world. In this post we will cover how to use complex Ansible inventories to create a hierarchy of configuration variables, and how they are inherited down into the resulting configuration. Using variable inheritance and host groups gives you the ability to flexibly assign variables to devices in a dynamic fashion based on group membership. We will see this when we get to the example at the end, where we ..read more

of this series on configuration templating, we looked at how to take some basic configurations and extract values that can be made into variables based on different data points, such as location or device type. Now that you have a foundation of how to extract data from configurations in order to create a list of configuration variables, how do you use this information to generate configurations? The next step is looking at how to use these variables to programmatically generate the corresponding configuration files. In order to do this we use a templating language called Jinja2 ..read more

parts of this series we discussed extracting variables from your device configurations, building your host and group data structures with those variables, and then using that data along with Jinja2 templates to generate configurations programmatically. In the third part of this series, we will dive deeper into the more advanced methods of manipulating the data output during generation by using two key features of Jinaj2, filters and macros ..read more

When discussing network automation with our customers, one of the main concerns that come up is the ability to audit their device configurations. This becomes especially important during the last quarter of the year, as many corporations are going through their yearly audit to obtain their required approvals for PCI or other compliance standards. Our solution for that is to use the , but it’s also entirely possible to use simple Ansible playbooks to perform the audit. This blog series will go over the essential pieces to understanding network configuration templating using Ansible, but the sam ..read more

This blog post aims to assist Ansible users in providing documentation to security teams when using privileged escalation (become) in Ansible playbooks ..read more

Ansible released 3.x in February 2021, which continues the project’s recent announcement that the code base will be splitting. As the project continues the transition, it’s important to understand some of the new terminology and understand how it might affect your environment ..read more

You certainly remember the first time you ran an Ansible playbook: a few lines of code grouped together in a bunch of that did a lot of magic. Struck by curiosity, you surely asked yourself what could be concealed behind that thing called . How was it possible that a few key/value pairs could abstract what usually would have been tens of lines of bash code? Well, we know that in software engineering there is not such a thing as magic, same is true for Ansible and Ansible modules ..read more

Adjusting Ansible playbook execution strategies is a use case that has come up several times. The default strategy Ansible uses, is called , and it works great a majority of the time, but what if you’re automating a task that need to be done in a specific order or way. Strategies can be used to define how a playbook should be executed. This includes the ability to run in serial, run in batches, and even, in extreme cases, allows the ability to write a custom strategy plugin ..read more