Book Image

Python Network Programming Techniques

By : Marcel Neidinger
Book Image

Python Network Programming Techniques

By: Marcel Neidinger

Overview of this book

Network automation offers a powerful new way of changing your infrastructure network. Gone are the days of manually logging on to different devices to type the same configuration commands over and over again. With this book, you'll find out how you can automate your network infrastructure using Python. You'll get started on your network automation journey with a hands-on introduction to the network programming basics to complement your infrastructure knowledge. You'll learn how to tackle different aspects of network automation using Python programming and a variety of open source libraries. In the book, you'll learn everything from templating, testing, and deploying your configuration on a device-by-device basis to using high-level REST APIs to manage your cloud-based infrastructure. Finally, you'll see how to automate network security with Cisco’s Firepower APIs. By the end of this Python network programming book, you'll have not only gained a holistic overview of the different methods to automate the configuration and maintenance of network devices, but also learned how to automate simple to complex networking tasks and overcome common network programming challenges.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Retrieving usage details and connected clients for a Meraki network

How many clients do you currently have on your network? What are their MAC addresses? How much data are they sending or receiving? When did the client first connect and when was the client last online? These kinds of questions lend themselves to automated report creation. In this recipe, we will explore how to extract these metrics using our API, and then save them into a CSV file that can be opened with a table calculation program such as Excel for further analysis.

Getting ready

Open your code editor and start by creating a file called usage.py. Next, navigate your terminal to the same directory that you just created the usage.py file in.

In your terminal, you'll also have to set an environment variable called MERAKI_DASHBOARD_API_KEY, whose value is the API key for your Meraki organization. Please refer to the Authenticating web requests recipe for an introduction on how to set environment variables...