Introduction

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Network Discovery and Management Toolkit

Network Discovery and Management Toolkit (ndmtk) makes Ansible work for both Traditional and Software-Defined Network (SDN) network management.

Purpose

The future of network management lies in the area of Artificial Intelligence. Any network-enabled device will be able to build connectivity to a remote peer on-demand, without human intervention. The restraint on that ability are the AI-enabled systems acting as gatekeepers. AI is impossible without ongoing data collection, data analysis, probing, and modeling. As such, networks of the future need tools to perform the above tasks.

This toolkit is designed to accomplish the data collection piece of the AI puzzle. Specifically, the toolkit is designed to:

  • discover data on network devices and capture the entirety of available data
  • configure network devices via SSH, telnet, console, or terminal server
  • collect, analyze, and store the data via command-line interactions; it performs data analysisn and, if necessary, it performs additional data collection and/or device configuration tasks.

Audience

The intended audience of this toolkit are system and network engineers and designers, as well as the researchers dealing with AI.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The toolkit is delivered in a form of an Ansible plugin. However, it could work well with Chef, or any other orchestration tool. The reason Ansible became a framework of choice is its modularity. The toolkit itself is modular. It allows extended existing functionality. For example, the plugin does not blindly run pre-defined commands. Rather, it first collects all of the commands forming the understanding of the function of a particular device in a network. Once the plugin receives the data, it runs it through its algorithms and determines whether there are any additional command required to further gather data. That process continues until the algorithms determine that the collection is complete.

The plugin has no required arguments and parameters, because there are a number of default commands available for various operating systems, e.g. Cisco Nexus OS, Arista EOS, Linux, etc.

Structured Data

Importantly, once the plugin completes its tasks it produces a number of reports in JSON, YAML, and JUnit formats. These reports provide a map of what was done, where the collected data reside, and what that data is.