bcoover/getinventory

GetInventory

GetInventory is a network device collector script. The purpose of this tool is to quickly and efficiently allow network engineers and operators to be more efficient in gathering details from network devices. Two primary sets out output will be produced per device. The first is an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet serves as the input for the application, copies itself to an output directory, and updates the output file with a standard set of information collected per device. The information gathered is parsed and added into tables on individual tabs within the file. In addition to the Excel file, each device can have a list of user input commands added into the 'Command' tab which will then be run against every device and a unique file will be output per device. These can be any standard command that the platform will support.

Excel Spreadsheet output

Output	Decription	Tab	Note
Device details	Hostname, model, IOS, etc	Main
Interface count	count of IF by type	Main
SFP Counts	count of SFP by type	Main	COMING SOON!
Inventory Details	parsed output of 'show inventory'	Inventory
ARP Tables	parsed output of 'show arp'	ARP	VRF Aware
MAC Addresses	parsed output of 'show mac-address'	MAC
Routing tables	parsed output of 'show ip route'	Routes	VRF Aware
BGP tables	parsed output of 'show ip bgp'	BGP	NOT VRF Aware (COMING SOON)
Interface info	parsed output of 'show interface' and 'show interface status'	Interfaces	VRF Aware
CDP Details	parsed output of 'show cdp neighbor detail'	CDP
LLDP Details	parsed output of 'show lldp neighbor detail'	LLDP

Note: GetInventory is NOT designed to push any configurations, only pull using show commands. The command 'config t' will cause unexpected behavior.

Device Support

GetInventory uses the python library Netmiko for SSH and Telnet connectivity. Although the platform is extensible to support multiple vendors, only the vendors and OSes listed below are validated. The application may run in 'command only' mode (if all parsing features are turned off), against vendor OSes not listed here.

Vendor OS Supported

• Cisco IOS
• Cisco NX-OS

Platform Support

GetInventory is intended to be cross-platform supportable, but has only been tested on Windows platforms. Any testing/coding help to test on LINUX or MAC would be greatly appreciated.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine or VM for deployment.

Prerequisites

Netmiko runs on Python and uses input from an Excel spreadsheet. The following details the minimum requirements to run this application.

• Microsoft Excel XLSX editor
• Python 3.6 or higher (recommend 3.7.6 as of 3/26/2020)
• Python module - Netmiko v3.0.0
• Python module - Openpyxl v3.0.3

Installing

Once Python is installed, the following steps should be followed to get the application functioning.

1. Download the repository from Github. Download using the ZIP file option, or you can use GIT or SVN to pull the repository using the URL https://github.com/tc45/GetInventory.git.

If downloading via ZIP: 2) Copy the ZIP file to a directory of your choice

copy GetInventory.zip c:\python\GetInventory

3. Extract the files into the directory created
4. Install python modules using pip

c:\python\GetInventory>pip install -r requirements.txt

5. Once requirements install without error, the application is ready to use.

Using GetInventory

GetInventory relies on an input Excel spreadsheet to execute. A default XLSX file is included in the repository and should be used to get started. At a minimum, a list of IP address/hostnames need to be added to get get started. The following is a full list of variables that may be needed at execution time.

Variable	Required	Input area	Description
IP Address/Hostnames	X	Spreadsheet only	Devices that need data collected from
Username	X	Spreadsheet or command line	SSH/Telnet username
Password	X	Spreadsheet or command line	SSH/Telnet password
Secret	X	Spreadsheet or command line	Enable password (Defaults to regular password if not specified)
Output Directory	X	Spreadsheet or command line	Directory where output spreadsheet and command files will be stored
Output Filename	X	Spreadsheet or command line	Specifies name of output spreadsheet
Parse Method		Spreadsheet only	Specifies 'device type' to be parsed. Defaults to cisco_ios)
Protocol		Spreadsheet only	Specify SSH or Telnet (Defaults to SSH if not specified)
Port		Spreadsheet only	Specify port if not standard port (Defaults 22 for SSH and 23 for Telnet
Device Username		Spreadsheet only	Per device override for username - COMING SOON
Device Password		Spreadsheet only	Per device override for password - COMING SOON

Open spreadsheet

Open the default spreadsheet, GetInventory - Default.xlsx, in the default directory. The file should default to the Main tab, but if not go ahead and click on the 'Main' tab. A sample of the beginning file is shown below.

Note: Any columns with a black header are currently not functioning.**

Add General Connectivity Details

The following values can be specified in the spreadsheet or added at run time to the command line. See section below on ** Command Line Options ** for additional details on how to add via command line. Any values specified at command line will override the value in the spreadsheet.

Chagne the following values to the requirements of your own project.

Variable	Location	Default
Username	Cell B1	local
Password	Cell B2	local
Secret	Cell B3	local
Output Directory	Cell B4	c:\temp\GetInventory\lab_test\run1
Output Name	Cell B5	Lab Testing

Add Devices Details

Update the list of Hosts that need data collected from in column A starting at row 8. Add one device IP address/hostname per line.

If the device is not a Cisco IOS device, go ahead and update Parse Method to the appropriate parser. Refer to section above on 'Device Support' to see what platforms are supported. Currently only cisco_ios and cisco_nxos are supported.

Starting at row 8:

Variable	Column	Required	Description
Host	A	Yes	Hostname/IP Address of device to connect
Active	B	No	Ignores hosts set to 'No'. Options: Yes/No Default: blank
Parse Method	C	No	Defines OS parser to be used. Options: cisco_ios, cisco_nxos, autodetect* Default: cisco_ios(blank)
Protocol	D	No	Toggle connection protocol. Options: Telnet, ssh Default: ssh(blank)
Port Override	E	No	Override default ports of 22(ssh) or 23 (telnet). 0-65535

• Autodetect - Logs into device to try and determine IOS before making selection. Takes approx 10 sec additional per device

Once device details including at least Hostnames/IP addresses have been added to the spreadsheet, save and close the Excel file.

Commands tab

All commands entered into the 'Commands' tab will be executed per device and output to an individual file in the output directory specified. Each file will be named after the hostname of the device that was entered in the Main tab.
The commands should be entered one per line in column A. All other columns will be ignored. Any command that doesn't require input should be valid. The default file has examples of typical commands, but this can be expanded to anything you need. Regular expressions, pipe | begin|include|section also work in these commands. Note that these commands are not platform specific. If you put in a switch command, it will be run on a router, but just output with '^ Invalid input detected' message.

Settings tab

Certain built in functions can be toggled on and off depending on the requirements of the project. Click the 'Settings' tab and choose the options relevant.

Value	Default	Notes
Gather version info	Yes
Gather ARP tab info	Yes
Gather MAC tab info	Yes
Gather interface tab info	Yes
Gather CDP tab info	Yes
Gather LLDP tab info	Yes
Gather route info	Yes
Gather BGP info	Yes
Gather inventory	Yes
Gather commands	Yes	Gather commands tab
Gather logging (to CSV)	FUTURE	Output logging

Executing the script

To execute the script, drop to a command prompt and navigate to the script directory. Launch python with the command line argument 'main.py' to execute the script. If no command line arguements are applied, the script will look in the local directory for the 'GetInventory - Default.xlsx' file to load as the source. Command line arguments listed below can be supplied at runtime to override some of the behavior of the spreadsheet.

Command line arguments

All global options in the Spreadsheet can be overriden with command line options which are revelead with either a -h or --help flag.

Arguement	Flag	Description
Username	-u <USERNAME>	Override global username
Password	-p <PASSWORD>	Override global password
Secret	-s <SECRET>	Override global secret
Input file	-i <XLS_INPUT_FILE>	Override default input file
Output directory	-o <OUTPUT_DIRECTORY>	Override file output directory
Output file	-f <XLS_OUTPUT_FILE>	Override output file

Override input file

c:\Python\GetInventory>python main.py -i "MY_CUSTOM_XLS_INPUT.xlsx"

Override username/password

c:\Python\GetInventory>python main.py -u "USER123" -p "ITSASECRET"

Override output file and directory

c:\Python\GetInventory>python main.py -o "c:\my documents\Project123" -f "Site1.xlsx"

Open output file

The output file will be in the directory specified in either the spreadsheet or via command line.

Depending on the options selected under settings check the following data tabs for output:

Tab Name	Items
Main	Original input, Make, Model, Interface Count, etc
Inventory	Part ID, Device, Description, Serial
Interfaces	IF, Description, Type, VRF, Trunk/Access, VLAN, etc
Routes	VRF, Protocol, Route, Subnet, CIDR, Next Hop IP, Distance, Metric, Uptime
BGP	Status, Path Selection, Route Source, Network, Next Hop, Metric, etc
ARP	VRF, IP Address, Age, Hardware/MAC, Type, Interface
MAC	Destination Address, Type, VLAN, Destination Port
CDP	Local Port, remote Port, Remote Host, Interface IP, MGMT IP, etc
LLDP	Chassis ID, Local Port, Remote Host, Remote Host, etc
Errors	Any errors encountered while executing parsing commands or connectivity issues

Future additions

Below are some of the planned future enhancements. I welcome any assistance.

• Cross OS Support (JUNOS, Aruba, Palo Alto, Cisco ASA, etc)
• OSPF table parsing
• EIGRP Table parsing
• Output log to CSV
• Multithreading
• CDP Crawling
• Network Discovery
• Subnet input instead of single IPs

Deployment

Add additional notes about how to deploy this on a live system

Built With

• Netmiko - SSH/Telnet connection handler
• Openpyxl - Excel document module
• ntcTemplates - network to code templates (JSON parsers)
• textFSM - raw data parser to JSON (Included in Netmiko)

Contributing

Please reach out to Tony if you are interested in contributing to this project.

Versioning

We use SemVer for versioning. For the versions available, see the tags on this repository.

Authors

• Tony Curtis - Initial work - Github-tc45 Network architect turned automation programmer

License

Acknowledgments

• To all the engineers that have run the tool and provided feedback to improve it.