Genie/pyATS for Production network?

[dasampson]

This could be the very wrong place to ask this question, please redirect me if that is true.

As I learn Genie and pyATS, all the examples that I see use a few network devices.  Is Genie and pyATS only intended for test automation purposes in small environments?  Or can it be used on a production network?

My use case would be:  A network engineer updates the IOS on a device.  Could Genie be used to verify that the device rebooted successfully?  That not only the configuration is correct, but that the routes came back successfully.

The challenge, we have over 3000 devices on our network.  Do I used Genie to create a known good network file(s) on all the devices that I use to compare against after a change?  Or do I run Genie right before the IOS upgrade, run the IOS upgrade on the device, run Genie post upgrade and compare?

If the recommendation is that Genie can be used on 3000+ devices, do I have one yaml file with every device in it?  That seems very hard to maintain.

[Seb Rupik]

Hi there,

Regarding your question about maintaining a large YAML file for all your network devices, what NMS are you using on your network?

It has been my experience from using Ansible on large networks is to extract device info from a single known correct source (typically the NMS) either as a single CSV or through API calls and then munge it through a script to output into a YAML hosts file.

Trying to keep two sources of device info up to date long term would be madness!

cheers,

Seb.

[Tagir Temirgaliyev]

in any case u need some list of gevices. i dont think u will upgrade ios on all 3000 devices in one second. i suppose u will do like today first 10, then next 10 and so on. oc u can use genie or ansible to check after upgrade