I started a public GitHub Repository in order to share some of my Python automation tools.

I work remotely on a large number of Arista switches and I have developed a script that captures the state of the network in order to run a comparison before and after network maintenance events. We have a monitoring system in place that alerts on various SNMP traps and events, but often times I need to interpret a number of changes via my network engineer lens to confirm that a maintenance period has been completed successfully.

The first Python script I’m publishing interfaces with an Arista switch over HTTPS and captures various outputs via the eAPI: inventory with serial numbers, vlan states, mac address table, lldp neighbors, routing protocol states, and route entries to a text file. A diff on the files can be run post maintenance event to highlight any changes for review.

This type of granular record can show that an item such as a metric on a route has changed. Our monitoring system does not alert on this type of change as it is monitoring the BGP peer status.

Link github.com/brentnowak/arista-tools