Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python

Screen scraping versus API automation

For a long period of time, the CLI was the only access method available to manage and operate network devices. Operators and administrators used to have SSH and Telnet to access the network terminal for configuration and troubleshooting. Python, or any programming language, has two approaches to communicating with devices. The first one is to use SSH or telnet the same as before and get the information, then process it. This method is called screen scraping and requires libraries that will be able to establish a connection to the device and execute a command directly on the terminal, and other libraries to process the returned information to extract useful data from it. This method often requires knowledge ...