When Data Visualization Enhances Network Automation: A Practical Example

The automation of capturing performance statistics from Network systems is not new. It has been prevalent for quite some time. Many of us have experimented with tools like Python libraries and even Ansible for network devices. However, I have observed that some of the most common examples of network automation are limited only to sending commands and receiving plain text output from Network devices. This approach used to be sufficient until a few years ago, when such tasks were considered outside the scope of traditional Network Administrators and done as favors rather than job responsibilities.

The lines between Operations/Administration and Development have been increasingly blurred, and traditional system/network administrators may find themselves at a disadvantage if they hesitate to embrace automation or take too long to adapt. Today’s expectations are different, and they will only become more demanding in the future. Merely writing a 10-line code snippet to collect interface statistics from a network switch will soon be inadequate. The new norms will require a form of network automation that goes beyond mere token efforts and instead delves into data manipulation, visualization etc.

In fact, let’s pose a question to ourselves… which of the two images below appears more appealing? It’s highly likely that the majority of us would choose the first one. If that’s the case, then why do we still rely heavily on textual information?

In the last post, we discussed how TextFSM can be used to parse unstructured or semi-structured data like the traditional CLI output of network devices and extract relevant information from it just like we do for JSON or XML formatted structured data. In today’s post, we will go over a very simple & straightforward use case that should be more than enough to demonstrate the benefits of bringing visualization techniques into the traditional automation world. We will be using a TextFSM template along with Python’s Matplotlib library to visualize a router’s CPU performance over a period of few hours.

Network Automation & Visualization Example

The Objective is to capture a Cisco router’s CPU usage at one hour interval and plot it as a graph at the end of it. For this exercise, we will capture CPU stats 5 times starting at 8 AM and ending at 12 noon.

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