The problem I use AI agents to diagnose networks by running show commands on devices and feeding the output to an LLM. Raw CLI output is extremely verbose: fixed-width tables padded with spaces, 80-ch
It was a typical morning, and I, a network engineer, found myself staring at a user’s PC that was acting up. The network was sluggish, connections were dropping, and I needed to get to the bottom of it—fast. My go-to tool, Wireshark, was nowhere to b...
Hey there! Today we will be building a cheat sheet to facilitate using some very helpful tools for network automation. This helps us get some fast information on network devices and verify the information and formats beforehand and while debugging wh...
Introduction As network engineers, we often deal with large datasets like IP addresses or subnets. Efficiently searching through these datasets is critical for automation tasks, such as finding a specific subnet in a network inventory. In this articl...
SSH Tunnels serve as a powerful method for establishing connections between three entities that face restrictions or limitations in directly reaching one another. These tunnels are particularly useful in overcoming challenges related to the direction...
Spanning-tree helps you create a loop-free topology in your switched network. The question we should ask ourselves is: What causes a loop in a switched network? We add loops in our network by adding redundancy in our switched network when there are...
Docker will be very useful for our future network automation tests and labs, so we will have a quick walk-through on how I set up my environment. Prerequisites WSL Windows 10 version 2004 and higher or Windows 11 Docker 64-bit processor 4GB RAM ...
In this series, I will provide a cheat sheet or summary of important BGP points and information for quick reference and review. This is not intended to be a detailed explanation, but rather a review for those who are already familiar with it. AS Rang...
When working with YAML files to store network device configurations, you might encounter a common issue: multi-line strings representing commands are loaded as a single string without newline characters. This can create problems when applying these c...
An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server is a backend system that acts as an intermediary between an AI agent (like GitHub Copilot) and various tools, APIs, or data sources. It provides a structured way for the AI to access and interact with external s...
The fundamentals of network design are the essential elements that all network designers must understand and know how to apply. These elements ensure that the design is robust, efficient, and suitable for the organization's needs. Below are the main ...
When programming, keeping a solid ground and understanding how to manipulate data will save you a lot of time and effort. For this reason, here are some useful methods to remember, along with examples to clarify when they would be helpful. Numbers ...
Welcome to our first post in a comprehensive series that will explore in detail what Network Design is. In this series, we will dive into the essential fundamentals of network design, discussing the basic principles that support the creation and main...
In this post, I want to discuss one of OSPF's most important building blocks. 💡 When learning routing protocols, the most important step to understanding it is learning the route discovery process and then the path evaluation. For OSPF, the route...
This article explores some of Python's essential functions—enumerate(), reversed(), zip(), map(), filter(), sorted(), and lambda—showing how they can be used to enhance scripts, simplify data processing, and improve overall network management. This i...
In certain situations, Jinja templates can become overly complex and difficult to manage due to the presence of numerous deeply nested if statements, which can make the logic hard to follow and maintain, and methods used to handle variables can becom...
# Outline: Basics Tips I Want to Remember As I continue to work with Docker, I find that many useful commands and concepts and overall container management I forget after some period away. This post serves as a comprehensive guide to Docker, organize...
While trying to wrap my head around some of the NetBox database relationships, I wished for a database schema diagram. I looked through the documentation and code repo but found nothing. I needed a tool to automatically generate diagrams based on an ...
Introduction to Network Automation This chapter delves into the fundamentals of network automation with Nornir, a powerful Python-based framework designed to simplify and accelerate network management operations. Nornir empowers network engineers to ...
Introduction In network automation, a "source of truth" is vital for managing and automating network devices, IP addresses, and connectivity. There are several alternative solutions that can serve as a "source of truth" for network automation, such a...
Problem Statement The other day I had a situation where I had two Windows machines from work that I wanted to transfer some big files (Bigger than allowed to send via email) and which I have no admin rights, so I could not really install programs and...
In the last post of this series, we downloaded the images and created the containers to run our monitoring environment. You can check it out here. Today we are going to create a docker-compose file to make our lives easier to spin up and tear down th...
What Sequence Diagram is A visualization of how the system actors interact within the system application. I’ve been looking for a while for a nice and fast way to build some diagrams. After some time looking around I have found this gem that is bein...
Welcome to my network automation monitoring exploration series! These posts are mainly for me to understand the TIG stack, Netbox, Containerlabs, StackStorm, and Docker better, and to document useful tips and tricks I discover. I hope you find them h...
Usually, as network engineers, we use Jinja2 to store configuration templates, so let us check the structures, thinking of a practical approach for our daily jobs. You might want to follow up with some testing for the following blog. Packet Coders ha...
Documentation as Code Jinja2 templates are mainly used for configuration templates. You can also use Jinja2 to format raw or parsed data into text reports, CSV, JSON files, or Markdown documents. Using it together with Python to gather/push informati...
Why JSON? JSON is very popular with Network engineers because many of the APIs and network devices already support it, it is easy to read and maps directly to Python objects. When we gather information on network devices or store information in files...
Deployment Options To start playing and testing Netbox, we currently have 2 options: Docker Netbox Cloud (Free) -- The advantage is that it can come with pre-populated information, so you don't have to spend as much time. Since I want to be able ...
The tools we are going to use are: VENV and PYENV venv: Python 3.3 and subsequent versions include a built-in module called venv that enables the creation of virtual environments. It establishes a fresh and unique Python environment, allowing for the...
This post is based on a real situation where we received a request to gather information about one of our customer sites and check for available ports on the switches. There is a SQL database inventory used as a source of truth where we can gather th...
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