A curated list of resources and packages for networking programmability and automation
-
Ansible
An agentless automation tooling that can perform a variety of automation functions against a wide variety of devices and operating systems. -
Puppet
An agent-based automation tooling that can perform a variety of automation functions against a wide variety of devices and operating systems. -
Chef
Agent-based automation tooling that focuses on the concept of "Infrastructure as Code." -
Salt
Agent-based automation tooling. Support for networking devices appears to be on the backseat, but has modules that provide some functionality like via NSO.
- Stanford Network Monitoring Tools
An unbelievably comprehensive list of network monitoring tools. If you want to look at everything, look here.
- Observium
"Observium is a low-maintenance auto-discovering network monitoring platform supporting a wide range of device types, platforms and operating systems ..."
-
Joy
"A package for capturing and analyzing network flow data and intraflow data, for network research, forensics, and security monitoring." -
pmacct
"A small set of multi-purpose passive network monitoring tools. It can account, classify, aggregate, replicate and export forwarding-plane data, ie. IPv4 and IPv6 traffic; collect and correlate control-plane data via BGP and BMP; collect infrastructure data via streaming network telemetry." -
ToDD
"ToDD is an extensible framework for providing natively distributed testing on demand." -
pipeline
"... an all-batteries-included utility which consumes IOS-XR telemetry streams directly from the router or indirectly from a publish/subscribe bus."
Supports IOS-XR specifically.
-
ATC (Augmented Traffic Control)
"A tool to simulate network conditions." "Developers can use ATC to test their application across varying network conditions, easily emulating high speed, mobile, and even severely impaired networks."
Developed by Facebook.
Supports Linux. -
Comcast
"Simulating [varying] network connections so you can build better systems."
Supports Linux and MacOS[X]. -
netem
"netem provides Network Emulation functionality for testing protocols by emulating the properties of wide area networks. The current version emulates variable delay, loss, duplication and re-ordering."
Supports Linux. -
dummynet
"traffic shaper, bandwidth manager and delay emulator"
Supports *BSD and MacOS[X].
Note for MacOS,ipfw
was deprecated in OSX 10.10 and replaced withpfctl
. Documentation is few and far between.dnctl
is utilized to control dummynet on MacOS. YMMV. -
tc (Linux Traffic Control)
A comprehensive overview of traffic control capabilities on Linux systems.
-
Ostinato
"Ostinato is a packet crafter, network traffic generator and analyzer with a friendly GUI." -
IxChariot
"Instant performance assessment of complex networks in pre and post deployment."
- scapy
"... a powerful interactive packet manipulation program. It is able to forge or decode packets of a wide number of protocols, send them on the wire, capture them, match requests and replies, and much more."
- YDK
Model-driven APIs for simplified programmability of your network device. Generates APIs based off of YANG models that can be used programmatically.
-
Napalm
Network Automation and Programmability Abstraction Layer with Multivendor support -
Paramiko
Implementation of SSHv2 protocol, providing both client and server functionality. -
Netmiko
Multi-vendor library to simplify Paramiko SSH connections to network devices. -
Trigger
"... a robust network automation toolkit written in Python that was designed for interfacing with network devices." -
CiscoConfigParse
This library examines an IOS-style config and breaks it into a set of linked parent / child relationships for auditing, modifying, and/or building new configurations. -
Jinja2
Templating language for Python and excellent library to use for generating network device configuration from templates.
-
Cisco gRPC Connection Libraries
Example repositories on how to use gRPC in Python, NodeJS, etc. for the IOS-XR end node. -
Solenoid
App that injects routes directly into Cisco's IOS-XR RIB table
-
Programmability and Automation with Cisco Open NX-OS
Understand how to utilize network programmability for NXOS (Programmability Fundamentals, Model Driven Programming, Configuration Automation) -
Beej's Guide to Network Programming
Arguably one of the simplest and best guides to using network sockets in C. Since it's in C you get to understand a lot of concepts that might otherwise be glossed over in higher level languages. Also has basic, boilerplate examples. -
Network Programmability and Automation
Good foundation for Network Engineers looking to be more comfortable with the standard tools of network automation. The book is in early release on Safari Online, and should be released later in 2017.
Contributions welcome! Read the contribution guidelines first.
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