Setting Up Ansible for Cisco ISE

Ansible is a simple yet Powerful Automation Language, which aims to cater automation for cloud provisioning, configuration management and applicaiton deployement and many other IT needs. Ansible supports automation for both CLI and GUI based device through various collections and modules available.

In this article, we will try to explore how we can leverage Ansible for managing devices like Cisco Security Products specifically Cisco ISE, to explore the capabilities of Ansible for the GUI Based Devices.

Let first look how we can install Ansible Client:

For MAC :

brew install ansible

For Centos:

yum update

yum install ansible -y

For Ubuntu:

apt-get update

apt-get install ansible

After installation gets complete check version of ansible:

ansible --version

Let use Ansible to connect to ISE to get all the network devices onboarded to ISE.

1. Create Inventory List:

ISE-Inventory.txt

2. Create Playbook to define the task to be performed:

3. Run playbook to get Desired Output from ISE.

From above we will have Output from Cisco ISE in JSON Format which, can then be, manipulated in any form as per need.

Once this playbook is ready, now this can be leveraged for multiple other options like:

• Using Python to automate the workflow end-to-end.
• Within single playbook multiple tasks can be mentioned to execute.
• Cumbersome task of managing ISE Operations can be optimised leveraging Cisco ISE Automation Capabilities with Ansible.

We will look for more such exciting capabilities!!!

Thanks for spending your time here !!