Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python

By : Bassem Aly
Book Image

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python

By: Bassem Aly

Overview of this book

Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python starts by covering the set up of a Python environment to perform automation tasks, as well as the modules, libraries, and tools you will be using. We’ll explore examples of network automation tasks using simple Python programs and Ansible. Next, we will walk you through automating administration tasks with Python Fabric, where you will learn to perform server configuration and administration, along with system administration tasks such as user management, database management, and process management. As you progress through this book, you’ll automate several testing services with Python scripts and perform automation tasks on virtual machines and cloud infrastructure with Python. In the concluding chapters, you will cover Python-based offensive security tools and learn how to automate your security tasks. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the skills of automating several system administration tasks with Python.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Collecting data from Linux

Native Linux commands provide useful data about the current system status and health. However, each one of those Linux commands and utilities are focused on getting data from only one aspect of the system. We need to leverage Python modules to get those details back to the administrator and generate useful system reports.

We will divide the reports into two parts. The first one is getting general information about the system by using the platform module, while the second part is exploring the hardware resources in terms of the CPU and memory.

We will start by leveraging the platform module, which is a built-in library inside of Python. The platform module contains many methods that can be used to get details about the system that Python operates on:

import platform
system = platform.system()
print(system)

Running the same script on a Windows machine will...