Heavy Networking 563: Automating Documentation With Ansible, Genie, And Jinja2

Heavy Networking welcomes back John Capobianco. In Heavy Networking 545: Achieving Automated Network State Validation, we went in deep on how to use automation to prove that your network is doing what you want it to do. On today’s episode, we’re going to go after some fruit hanging a little lower–getting network data you reference all the time and storing it in CSVs so that you can avoid the CLI tapdance to find out if, say, a particular trunk link is carrying a particular VLAN. To pull this off, we’ll talk through Ansible to get the data, the Genie parser to structure the data, and Jinja2 to format the data. If you don’t use any of those tools and just threw something, don’t be intimidated! This isn’t that hard, and John’s going to walk us through it all. For his day job, John is Sr. IT Planner and Integrator for the House of Commons in the Canadian Parliament. JSON-MANIA. 😂 Show Links: @John_Capobianco – John on Twitter John Capobianco on GitHub John Capobianco on LinkedIn Automate Your Network – John’s Blog Automate Your Network – John’s Book Collaboration is the key to automation success – A Genie Success Story – Automate Your Network Episode 545: Achieving Automated Network State Validation – Packet Pushers Heavy Networking Podcast with John Genie Documentation – Cisco DevNet NTC Templates – Network To Code via GitHub Markmap