The Struggle with Structure – Network Automation, Design, and Data Models

Preface Modern enterprise networking is going to require a level of structure and consistency that the majority of its networking community may find unfamiliar and perhaps uncomfortable. As a community, we’ve never had to present our designs and configuration data in any kind of globally consistent or even industry standard format. I’m fascinated by all READ MORE

Building a Production-ish Ready WebEx Teams ChatBot

Introduction Is your interrupt-driven day no longer supportable? Is there a particular Project Manager that asks you the same question every morning? Do you often have to take some technical data and simplify it for semi- or non-technical consumption? Would you like to pull out relevant sections of technical data for a sibling team? Today READ MORE

Decomposing Data Structures

Whether you are trying to find all the tenants in an ACI fabric, or all the interface IPs and descriptions on a network device, or trying to determine if the Earth is in imminent danger from an asteroid hurtling towards it, understanding complex data structures is a critical skill for anyone working with modern IT READ MORE

A quick example of using TextFSM to parse data from Cisco show commands – Python3 Version

As part of my ongoing effort to migrate everything over to Python 3, it’s time to show this “quick example” in Python 3. TextFSM is a powerful parsing tool (python module) developed by Google.    There are some great examples out there to get you started. Here are two I urge you to read if this READ MORE