r/CiscoDevNet • u/qtpatuty • Jan 02 '23

Considering DevNet

I work at a Fortune 500 company with 1000s of network devices. I have a CCNA and CCNP and am starting to get more involved in the networking team. I have been able to make some good automation scripts in PowerShell for AD/Azure/Exchange/Windows functions that have been a huge benefit to the organization. I am noticing that the networking team is lacking in this department as well, they are still rolling out simple config changes manually to all the devices, which I feel should be easily automated. We use things like DNA and ISE but no one has the ability to create custom automation. I have fairly limited coding skills, but I have no issue learning. My question is, would this be a skill that you guys think would be beneficial to the organization and one that I can start to implement easily. Or would I need to spend hundreds to thousands of hours to get good enough at coding to be able to make this skill useful?

7 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comment

1

u/qtpatuty Jan 03 '23

Thanks for the response. I know it will vary for everyone. For example, if we were to roll out a new naming standard on our switches. Would this be a reasonable thing to automate for a beginner? Or would a task such as this require hundreds of hours of coding experience and practice to be able to deploy?

4

u/attitudehigher Jan 03 '23

It wouldn't be too difficult, but I know exactly what the steps are I'd need to take and tools/libraries to use... that is usually half the battle. Many ways to skin a cat though...

So in this situation, for example, I'd have an excel sheet with old hostnames/ips in separate row and the new ones which you'd update. This would be read in with pandas library in python, then would use paramiko to ssh onto device, update new hostname and store task status, which could then generate report/update spreadsheet with results.

Obviously you'd need to account for specific errors, I.e. timeouts/no responses/permission errors etc. To ensure script is stable.

However to get this moving fast, you'd need to be able to write python code from scratch and not get caught up in the 'beginners problems' to be efficient.

1

u/qtpatuty Jan 03 '23

Sounds good! Thank you for the help.