Gain insights into automating network reconnaissance, orchestrating repetitive changes, and transforming network configuration management. Discover CI/CD pipeline migration for full network automation.

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​​Network automation begins with automating network reconnaissance. This is accomplished by gathering important information from network devices while building a library of dynamic on-demand utilities and generating living documentation. Starting small, the course exhibits the simplicity and elegance of network automation.

Next, you will learn how to automate larger changes that require a high number of repetitive steps. These changes will be executed serially in a specific orchestrated order, making them perfect for an automated solution. After gaining comfort with the new tools, you can fully transform network configuration management to an automated, intent-based, self-documenting system.

The final step is learning how to migrate to a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, thereby fully automating the network.

Automate Your Network

Previously, we had some hands-on experience on a simple emulated network and used ansible to display device facts to console and save them to JSON.

In this lesson, we will learn to save facts to MD files and to use templates to filter out the relevant facts to store.

# Running a playbook
Let's take a look at how we can gather information about our devices using Ansible, and store them in an MD file.

In the example below, we have 3 devices on our network: `PC1`, `PC2`, and `PC3` grouped under `PCs`. We will use Ansible to gather facts about these devices.


Running the widget at the end of this lesson will automatically run the following command:
```
ansible-playbook facts_to_md.yml
```
This will run the `facts_to_md.yml` playbook for all devices in the PCs group and save the facts in a file with a name format `<host_ip>_Facts.md`.

We can use `ls` to view the filename and view the contents of this file using `cat`.

> We can also view them using `Vim`. Once done, we can exit the editor by typing `:q`.

To limit the output to just a single device, we can add the `--limit` flag and provide the IPv4 address of the device we want to single out. 

We can get the IPv4 addresses of our devices by using:
```
cat /etc/ansible/hosts
```

An example of running the playbook with the `--limit` flag is as follows:
```bash
ansible-playbook facts_to_md.yml --limit 172.20.20.2
```

The playbook will use the `Templates/Facts.j2` template. This will allow us to only document the relevant facts about the device(s) and store them in an MD file.

> If we want to modify and re-run the playbooks, we can use a console-based text editor (Vim, nano) in the terminal window. Then, re-issue the `ansible-playbook` command. If you modify the playbooks in the widget's graphical editor, press **"Run"** to update the underlying container with your updated file(s).

Try it out in the widget below:

Get some practice with documenting device facts and saving them to MD files using templates and Ansible playbooks.

Introduction

What Is Network Automation?

Why Automate the Network?

How to Automate the Network

Where to Start with Network Automation

Repository Structure

Network Reconnaissance

Tactical Playbooks

Data Models and Dynamic Templates

Dynamic Intent-Based Documentation

Configuration Management

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery

Conclusion

Hands-On: Documentation in MD