Blog

Introduction Recently someone asked: Is there a way to fetch CVE (vulnerability) data for platforms like Cisco, Palo Alto, and Fortinet in a programmatic way, so we can integrate it into a solution we’re building? The short answer: yes—and one of the best ways to do this is

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

Introduction to PyeAPI The Python Client for eAPI (pyeapi) is a native Python library wrapper around Arista EOS eAPI. It provides a set of Python language bindings for configuring Arista devices. In this blog post, we will look at how to install pyeapi, some prerequisites and some examples. The pyeapi

Introduction In this blog post, we’re going to explore Jinja2, an incredibly versatile tool that’s very useful for network automation. At its core, Jinja2 is a template engine. You can think of it as a stencil in arts and crafts. Just as you might use a stencil to

What is JSONata? Dealing with nested JSON can be challenging—looping, complex key lookup chains, etc. Though there are various options out in the community for easing this pain, the one project I always enjoyed was JSONata. It's easy to use and has strong transformation features—something lacking

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

Today I want to share with you 3 of my favourite commands when using Pytest. But first of all... Whats Pytest? For those of you who are new to Pytest (checkout new instructor-led course here): Pytest is a flexible, mature and feature-rich framework for testing Python code. Pytest has been