Network automation: Infrastructure visibility

Infrastructure Visibility is the ability to retrieve information from network devices and quickly gain accurate information and insights to the configuration and state of network devices. In many organizations the running configuration is the "source of truth" which means that whenever there is a problem the first few steps are performing various show commands and looking at the configuration on the box. In fact, when opening a ticket with most network vendors, they will use scripts or aliases to simply dump every show command and output they can because they don’t trust network diagrams, IPAM (IP addressmanagement) tools or even the network administrator who opened the issue.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allows you to quickly transform network configuration and network device state into structured data, transform that structured data into whatever output you want. For example in this lab we will transform the output into a simple HTML webiste. This concept is commonly referred to as Dynamic Documentation and can be used in many different uses cases.