Nornir Napalm validation task is used to automate compliance check of configuration of network devices.
Compliance check means to make sure that the network device have compatible configuration for example in DNS and NTP servers.
Nornir Napalm send configuration through “napalm_configure” task is what we demonstrate in this section.
We will also discuss the difference between “merge” and “replace” when sending the configuration to network devices.
Nornir Napalm getter and Send Commands are two methods to send monitoring and troubleshooting commands to network devices in napalm plugin.
Nornir Napalm getters are vendor independent show commands common to all supported vendors and it is invented by Napalm. This is the topic of this section.
Nornir napalm send command is normal CLI command that we send to network devices when no getter is provided and it is the topic of the next section.
We also discuss the structured output of Napalm getter and CLI commands and how it differs from Netmiko and Scrapli plugin.
Network automation data structure for separating data and configuration is what we discuss in this module.
Each configuration has some data that may be different or the same between devices. SNMP community, IP address of NTP servers, network addresses in EIGRP configuration and IP address and AS number of neighbors in BGP configuration are some examples of data in network automation.
How to store and access the data of the configuration of various network devices is what we call network automation data structure
In this section, we use inventory files to store and access the configuration data as well.
But in the next section we will store and access data of configurations via its own specific data structure.