Cisco pyATS Network Test and Automation Solution: Data-driven and reusable testing for modern networks

Chapter 7

Automated Network Documentation

Early in my career, I was tasked by the finance department to capture the information of a new pair of Cisco 6500 Catalyst switches with various supervisors and line cards. The naive junior engineer that I was at the time brought them pages of printouts of the show inventory command! “We can’t use this. We need something that is business-ready.” Those that are forever etched in my memory. Nearly 15 years later I was able to automatically transform that show inventory command from raw unusable output into a “business-ready” comma-separated values (CSV) spreadsheet with pyATS jobs and a templating language called Jinja2. Automated network documentation is the recommended starting place for anyone who is ...