Need Help Automating Firmware Version Checks for Cisco Devices

[ishara]

Hello Everyone,

I’m working with several companies, and part of my responsibility is ensuring that the firmware versions of our Cisco devices (e.g., core switches) are up to date. Each device is tied to specific SLAs, and maintaining updated firmware is crucial for compliance and performance.

Currently, I manually check each device’s firmware version and compare it with available updates, but this process is time-consuming and prone to errors, especially with a large number of devices. I’m looking for a way to automate this process to streamline the firmware update management.

Here’s my situation:

• I have a database with details of the devices (such as model, current firmware version, etc.).

• I need to automate the process of comparing the current firmware version with the available version on Cisco Software Central (or other relevant sources).

• Ideally, when I update the database with a device’s details, the system should automatically notify me if there is a newer firmware version available.

Has anyone implemented a solution for this type of automation? Is there an API or tool that I can use to pull the latest firmware versions from Cisco Software Central (or another source) and compare them with the current versions on my devices?

Any guidance or resources on how to approach this would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help!

Best regards,

Ishara.

[balaji.bandi]

If you have DNAC or Prime that does a compliance check and does the task for you.

If you are looking out of the box, you need to build one that can work for your custom requirements. It is durable and requires some programming and automation knowledge and testing.

You can use Cisco NSO or Radkit, which can give you compliance check information.

Note: I wrote a Python script to check all the device IOS versions and get a report comparing them with the Cisco stable version on Cisco switches, routers, WLCs, and so on.

there is lot of repository code share in  https://developer.cisco.com/

[bigevilbeard]

There are couple of examples you can find instead of having to build net new. For example this one would be adopted for situation https://developer.cisco.com/codeexchange/github/repo/bgillies95/day0_code_exchange/

You should also look at NetBox, as this would simplify you solution, here is a blog post https://journey2theccie.wordpress.com/2020/06/18/using-netbox-webhooks-to-update-cisco-devices/