Network Automation with David

Where to Start? You have been tasked with implementing a new network automation solution. You open the documentation: a wiki page that is outdated, and you see a lot of Excel sheets with different versions of the same information. And team members are telling you to just log into the devices to get the information you need. The network has been built over the years with different architects, engineers, and administrators, each with their own approach to documentation and configuration management. As a result, the network is in a state of chaos, with inconsistent or outdated documentation, configuration drift, and misconfigurations.

Why tool selection matters Picking the wrong tool for network automation rarely shows up as an obvious failure. It shows up six months later, when you’re hitting scale limits, maintaining code nobody else understands, or trying to add a feature the tool was never designed for. This post won’t give you a list of tools to use. It will give you a framework for evaluating them, with some real examples of what goes wrong when that evaluation is skipped.

What do we choose? Paramiko or Netmiko? When it comes to automating network devices using Python, two popular libraries often come up: Paramiko and Netmiko. Choosing between these two can be a bit of a dilemma, especially for those new to network automation. Even for experienced network engineers, choosing the right tool can still be a challenge. Making the decision between Paramiko and Netmiko can feel like a steep climb for beginners. In this post, I’ll show a few use cases and best practices to help you decide which library is the best fit for your needs and how to get started with it.