Review
CLI, NETCONF, RESTCONF, structured versus unstructured data, gNMI and when to use which. PEP 8. Naming conventions. Packages, modules, Classes and methods. The scrapli library. Netmiko versus scrapli.
Hands on: scrapli, Dictionaries versus Regular Expressions.
Modules and Functions
Writing your own modules, containers versus packages, virtual environments. Best practices, calling functions, writing your own functions. Parameters, arguments. Named arguments, dictionaries as arguments. Builtins. Docstrings. Main. __name__, __main__ . Program arguments.
Hands on: Getting interfaces, showing interface status using Netmiko and functions. Using dictionaries as arguments. Writing your own modules.
Parsing strategies
Turning unstructured data into structured data. textfsm, PyATS Genie parser, NAPALM getters, Template Text Parser.
Hands on: Genie parser, TTP. Accessing structured data with lists and dictionaries.
Classes, objects and Python
Python classes in Genie, PyEZ and others .
Hands on: studying network automation classes, objects, methods and attributes.
Configuration management – more nornir, ncclient, requests
Nornir tasks. Nornir results, Nornir functions, Nornir plugins. Nornir processors. YANG, YANG models, pyang. NETCONF hello. Capabilities. Schemas. Filters. Subtrees. XPATH. Exploring available YANG data models. NETCONF and network wide transactions. Asserting NETCONF capabilities. Configuration types. Locking configurations, commits. NETCONF data stores. Netconf-console. RESTCONF differences from NETCONF. URI construction. Postman. More XML and JSON. Git and configuration versions.
Hands on: Nornir and Jinja2. Exploring available models, NETCONF filters. Using postman.
Python error handling and debugging
Context handlers, try, assert, logging, pdb, pytest, unit testing, chatgpt.
Hands on: Writing code with each of the error handling methods, investigating what happens on an error. Use chatgpt to debug your code.
Python Automation Testing
Testing and validation. pyATS, Genie. Testbed file. Genie parse, genie learn, genie diff. Genie conf, Genie ops, Genie SDK, Genie harness. Xpresso.
Hands on: Using Genie for state comparisons of the network.
Network analysis
Batfish, pybatfish, configuration analysis, analysing routing, analysing ACLs. Pandas. Pandas dataframe. Filtering and selecting values of interest.
Hands on: Use Batfish to analyse network snapshots, find network adjacencies, flow path analysis.
Network observability
Suzieq, using docker, using as a package. Sqpoller, suzieq-gui, suzieq-cli, sq-rest-server. Namespaces and seeing devices, network state and Asserts. Time based analysis, snapshots and changes.
Hands on: Suzieq: Gathering data from the network, analysing data from the network. Network state assertion.
Telemetry
gRPC, gNMI. CAP, GET, SET. Subscriptions. Model Driven telemetry.
Hands on: Analysing telemetry data with Python.
Concurrency
asyncio, threads, processes. Nornir concurrency. Scrapli and netmiko concurrency.
Hands on: Multiple SSH connections to devices at same time. Scarpli asyncio.
