Ansible

Overview When working with Ansible, you often deal with structured data made up of nested dictionaries and lists. This could be anything from device configurations to network status or inventory data. Accessing the specific piece of data you need can get messy, especially when the structure is deep or repetitive.

Overview Not all of us Network Engineers have a dedicated network configuration backup tool for various reasons. Paid solutions like Orion are excellent but come with a high cost. There are solid open-source alternatives like Rancid or Oxidized, but setting them up can be a bit complex. Or maybe you

Overview As network engineers, we are very much used to making configuration changes via the CLI, something we've relied on since the start of our networking careers. However, in the past few years, there has been a push towards network automation, with tools like Ansible and Python becoming

Introduction One key component of Ansible is its inventory. Ansible’s inventory lets you organise and define the targets you will automate. Whether you're automating a small network or a large-scale deployment, a solid inventory setup—and knowing how to work with it—makes all the difference. In

Within this post we will step through how to create a CSV file within Ansible. But before we do ... What is a CSV File Used For? A CSV (Comma Separated Values) file is a simple text format for storing tabular data. It's widely used because of its straightforward

NetBox is a hugely popular open-source IP address management (IPAM) and data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) tool. NetBox provides a range of automation features, one of which is the ability to update NetBox with Ansible using the Ansible NetBox collection. In this short post, we'll walk through the

One of the big announcements from Redhat recently is the tech preview of Ansible Lightspeed, a new AI service around easing the process of creating your Ansible code. What is Ansible Lightspeed? Ansible Lightspeed is a generative AI tool designed to help with the creation of Ansible content. It is

Today I'm going to show you an inbuilt debugger tool that you can use in Ansible to help troubleshoot your tasks and playbooks. As per the Ansible docs, the debugger tool allows you to: … fix errors during execution instead of editing your Playbook and running it again to

A common question that arises in the area of network automation is: What’s the difference between Ansible and Nornir? I mean, they are both frameworks that can manage and automate groups of network devices, right? They are also both built on top of Python. So what is the difference