Book Image

Practical Network Automation

By : Abhishek Ratan
Book Image

Practical Network Automation

By: Abhishek Ratan

Overview of this book

Network automation is the use of IT controls to supervise and carry out every-day network management functions. It plays a key role in network virtualization technologies and network functions. The book starts by providing an introduction to network automation, SDN, and its applications, which include integrating DevOps tools to automate the network efficiently. It then guides you through different network automation tasks and covers various data digging and reporting methodologies such as IPv6 migration, DC relocations, and interface parsing, all the while retaining security and improving data center robustness. The book then moves on to the use of Python and the management of SSH keys for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, all followed by practical use cases. The book also covers the importance of Ansible for network automation including best practices in automation, ways to test automated networks using different tools, and other important techniques. By the end of the book, you will be well acquainted with the various aspects of network automation.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Interaction with Splunk


Splunk is one of the most widely used data mining tools. With its data mining and digging capabilities, engineers can take actions based upon decisions. While it is useful in various aspects, here we will see an example of Splunk being used as a Syslog server, with our test router sending a message (as syslog) to this server, and how from automation we can query results from Splunk for these syslogs and take actions.

This is an important part of automation, since based upon certain events (alerts and syslogs), engineers need to perform automated tasks, like self healing, or even triggering emails or using third-party tools to create tickets for various teams to work on.

Here we will see the basic implementation and configuration of Splunk as a Syslog server:

  1.  After downloading and installing Splunk , it can be accessed from the URL http://localhost:8000/en-US/account/login?return_to=%2Fen-US%2F as we can see in the following screenshot:
  1. Once we login, we create a listener...