While I haven’t been as active with NetDB lately, I’ve been hard at work on other projects. One I’m excited to announce here is a new network application, NetGrph. While NetDB lets you know about everything at the edge of your network, NetGrph understands the insides of your network:
There is no GUI at this time other than the Neo4j interface, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see one in the future. We are using the app to automate troubleshooting, security and deployments across devices rather than providing a customer facing view at this time.
I believe this new view of your network will complement NetDB very well, and I will soon be releasing a packaged VM of NetDB v1.14 and NetGrph as a single pre-configured OVA. At this time, this app is cisco only, but I assume other scrapers will show up if people find it useful. The data sources are simpler than NetDB, so it should be even easier to gather data with config parsing, screen scraping or APIs.
At this stage, I have only fully tested it on Ubuntu 14.04, and I doubt it will be supporting on the old 12.04 version. I assume you could upgrade it, but make sure to backup your database and snapshot your VM before you try it.
Going forward, I will be maintaining NetDB but likely not expanding it. One day I would like to rewrite the web interface, but only after I write a NetGrph one. I have written a NetDB driver right in to NetGrph, and am slowly developing it as Python module. The application itself will be a standalone app, but it will also integrate with NetDB for more powerful reporting and queries.
I hope you like it. If you’re not experienced installing code directly from GitHub, you might want to wait a couple months, but if you’ve done it a few times, this should be strait-forward.
Any feedback is appreciated,
Jonathan
Last edit: Jonathan Yantis 2016-07-01
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Pop Corn :) and test.
I'm very happy to try this new project, i will give you feedback if necessary.
I know now, that the VM is coming soon.
Love your work !
Fred
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
This ones a little more experimental for now, but here’s an example workflow we used the other day:
Get a list of all of our NAC networks that need an IP helper change as JSON
Pass that to a quick parser that grabs all the routers and VLANs to change
netgrph -nlist nac -o json | get-interfaces.py
Output (really long list):
mdcmdf,271,272
artmdf1,271,272
Then we fed that to our job script and deployed the helper in about two minutes. Like I said, this one is a little more experimental, but if you’re looking to do any Ansible work, deploy/cleanup networks, or automate troubleshooting and path analysis, this makes all of that easier. Even if you’re not doing any scripting yourself, the reporting, alerting and path analysis is useful.
With the OVA, I hope to have as many things pre-configured and integrated as possible out of the box. First though I need a few people to put this through it’s paces, so any feedback is of course appreciated.
Pop Corn :) and test.
I'm very happy to try this new project, i will give you feedback if necessary.
I know now, that the VM is coming soon.
Love your work !
Fred
Hey, we use Bluecat, it’s a commercial product. Can’t say I love it, but it does have APIs and such we’re able to use.
One thing I’m going to add to NetGrph soon is scope alerting and sizing information based on integration with NetDB data. We’re basically looking to line things up, so when scopes full up, we can push a button to deploy new networks, and flip all unused ports to the new network to keep them from overflowing.
A lot of our deployment code is very custom, but I’ll see if I can publish some of our other tools as we go, at least to serve as examples. Scope alerting and such will be integrated into NetGrph since it understands all that information, but we’re still going to rely on a proper IPAM for address management.
NetGrph is designed to be a network model for automation, rather than an authoritative database of information. I’m basically trying to get all the information together we need to troubleshoot problems and make major changes without doing things box by box, an SDN Orchestrator of sorts.
... I discovered that we have an API too with our commercial product
Thanks, for the information. We use infoblox solution for dhcp only but
It know all our blocks. I Will try this.
For your feedback, sorry but i dont have enough skills To install it from source.
I Will wait an ova To do that
Fred.
If you would like to refer to this comment somewhere else in this project, copy and paste the following link:
Hey everyone,
While I haven’t been as active with NetDB lately, I’ve been hard at work on other projects. One I’m excited to announce here is a new network application, NetGrph. While NetDB lets you know about everything at the edge of your network, NetGrph understands the insides of your network:
https://github.com/yantisj/netgrph
There is no GUI at this time other than the Neo4j interface, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see one in the future. We are using the app to automate troubleshooting, security and deployments across devices rather than providing a customer facing view at this time.
I believe this new view of your network will complement NetDB very well, and I will soon be releasing a packaged VM of NetDB v1.14 and NetGrph as a single pre-configured OVA. At this time, this app is cisco only, but I assume other scrapers will show up if people find it useful. The data sources are simpler than NetDB, so it should be even easier to gather data with config parsing, screen scraping or APIs.
At this stage, I have only fully tested it on Ubuntu 14.04, and I doubt it will be supporting on the old 12.04 version. I assume you could upgrade it, but make sure to backup your database and snapshot your VM before you try it.
Going forward, I will be maintaining NetDB but likely not expanding it. One day I would like to rewrite the web interface, but only after I write a NetGrph one. I have written a NetDB driver right in to NetGrph, and am slowly developing it as Python module. The application itself will be a standalone app, but it will also integrate with NetDB for more powerful reporting and queries.
I hope you like it. If you’re not experienced installing code directly from GitHub, you might want to wait a couple months, but if you’ve done it a few times, this should be strait-forward.
Any feedback is appreciated,
Jonathan
Last edit: Jonathan Yantis 2016-07-01
Pop Corn :) and test.
I'm very happy to try this new project, i will give you feedback if necessary.
I know now, that the VM is coming soon.
Love your work !
Fred
Thanks Fred!
This ones a little more experimental for now, but here’s an example workflow we used the other day:
Get a list of all of our NAC networks that need an IP helper change as JSON
Pass that to a quick parser that grabs all the routers and VLANs to change
netgrph -nlist nac -o json | get-interfaces.py
Output (really long list):
mdcmdf,271,272
artmdf1,271,272
Then we fed that to our job script and deployed the helper in about two minutes. Like I said, this one is a little more experimental, but if you’re looking to do any Ansible work, deploy/cleanup networks, or automate troubleshooting and path analysis, this makes all of that easier. Even if you’re not doing any scripting yourself, the reporting, alerting and path analysis is useful.
With the OVA, I hope to have as many things pre-configured and integrated as possible out of the box. First though I need a few people to put this through it’s paces, so any feedback is of course appreciated.
Jonathan
Last edit: Jonathan Yantis 2016-07-03
Hi John,
What do you use for ipam. To organize your subnet database ?
I use gestioIP.
Hey, we use Bluecat, it’s a commercial product. Can’t say I love it, but it does have APIs and such we’re able to use.
One thing I’m going to add to NetGrph soon is scope alerting and sizing information based on integration with NetDB data. We’re basically looking to line things up, so when scopes full up, we can push a button to deploy new networks, and flip all unused ports to the new network to keep them from overflowing.
A lot of our deployment code is very custom, but I’ll see if I can publish some of our other tools as we go, at least to serve as examples. Scope alerting and such will be integrated into NetGrph since it understands all that information, but we’re still going to rely on a proper IPAM for address management.
NetGrph is designed to be a network model for automation, rather than an authoritative database of information. I’m basically trying to get all the information together we need to troubleshoot problems and make major changes without doing things box by box, an SDN Orchestrator of sorts.
Jonathan
... I discovered that we have an API too with our commercial product
Thanks, for the information. We use infoblox solution for dhcp only but
It know all our blocks. I Will try this.
For your feedback, sorry but i dont have enough skills To install it from source.
I Will wait an ova To do that
Fred.