I was looking through my email this morning as someone needed to turn on and access a really old switch in a specific part of the network, but no one could remember the credentials. Resetting the switch would have been a big hustle in that specific area (it’s essentially a museum, the disruption would be…
Category: Automation
Onboarding the network in Netbox – a series of talks with myself and a little story telling – Part 1
Intro When and where we met It must have been over 1,5 years ago, more like 2 probably.. I was watching one of @dmfigol‘s video streams on Twitch (most of them also published on his channel on Youtube ), where i heard him mention Netbox for the first time.. So I looked it up! I…
Ansible playbooks for Nagios Installation on Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS / 20.04 LTS
Hello all, this is @mythryll , I hope everyone is staying safe! This is going to be a long one, so strap in and enjoy the ride (hopefully)! A little back story A few years back I had started a conversation with the great Michael Friedrich who was at the time working at Icinga (I…
Monitor VPN Users on Check Point Firewall with the help of Netmiko and Python, InfluxDB and Grafana
Preface This post describes how I got to create Python scripts in order to graph the VPN user count on Check Point GAIA Gateways to Grafana, using InfluxDB as Time Series Database to store the data. The process had several byproducts, such as Python scripts for reading and writing data to CSV files, creating and…
Migrating from MRTG/RRD/CGI to Grafana/InfluxDB/Telegraf on Docker containers for Enterprise Network Performance Monitoring with SNMP – Part 2
In the previous episode… In the previous part of this series of posts, I described how it came to be that our SNMP monitoring infrastructure based on MRTG/RRD/CGI had reached the end of its days and how I decided to use Grafana with InfluxDB and Telegraf to replace it. The last post stopped right before…
Migrating from MRTG/RRD/CGI to Grafana/InfluxDB/Telegraf on Docker containers for Enterprise Network Performance Monitoring with SNMP – Part 1
(if you are looking for part2, it’s here) Introduction I like reading guides, not writing them (it takes too long for me). So this isn’t a guide, it’s more like an adventure tale, it’s a “I got out one day for a stroll and look what happened!”. I had no knowledge of Grafana, InfluxDB, Telegraf…
Campus Vlan Cleanup after DC upgrade / Using Netmiko +NTC-Templates
Hello everyone. Once more, trying to inset automation in maintenance tasks, after we performed a DC upgrade at the company network, separating DC/Campus networks, we needed to clean up a lot of vlans from the campus networks. I came up with this script to play around, make the task more interesting and also avoid repetitive…
Using netmiko with NTC-Templates to gather data into for DC migration – Produce cisco configuration commands from Excel file
One month ago, we were migrating our DC core from older Cisco Catalyst models to Nexus models in 2 different DCs, connected over WDM, a longtime plan to provide a better foundation for networking services in our environment (+OTV, MacSec, etc). One of the plan’s main ideas was to separate user and DC networks and…
Python Script to process Prime LMS report for reclaiming Unused Up ports from legacy Cisco switches
In our previous attempt we created a script that took a prepared text file containing switches ip addresses and ports to be switched to a dummy vlan, preventing access for anyone connecting without permission. In this one, we will take a “Reclaim Unused Up” report that is created from Cisco Prime LMS, the well known…
Python Script to change inactive cisco switch ports to a dummy vlan
I am working on this script for a repetitive task we do at work. We often do a scan for inactive ports in building switches and if they are inactive for a long time, we set them to a dummy vlan that offers no ip connectivity to anyone connecting to it and turning on the…