Now, we need to populate our Single Source of Truth (SSOT). Manually adding interfaces for each device is impractical. Hence, automating this process by reading device configurations and creating corresponding SSOT objects is essential.

Currently, there’s no official system for automatic device discovery. This led me to develop NetDoc  years ago, though it’s currently exclusive to Netbox.

Let’s create a simple automation to efficiently handle this task.

Tools We’ll Use:

• Netmiko  for device connectivity and information retrieval.
• NTC Templates  to parse information into structured data.
• Nautobot’s REST API  to create SSOT objects.

Assuming the device is manually created in our SSOT for convenience, our automation will focus solely on populating interfaces.

Let’s proceed step-by-step to develop our automation.

Parameters Needed for Our Automation

Our automation requires the following parameters to function effectively:

• nautobot_base_url: The URL to access Nautobot.
• nautobot_apikey: The API key for making REST API requests to Nautobot.
• host: The IP address of the physical device to be read.
• username: The username used to access the physical device.
• password: The password used to access the physical device.

You can create the API key on Nautobot by navigating to User -> Profile -> API Tokens -> Add a token.

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