Introduction to ansible-cisco_additional_facts

This Ansible module is intended to gather more detailed facts about Cisco devices, such as route tables, MAC address tables, VRFs, and more. Currently supports IOS and NX-OS devices. It also adds a gather interfaces function that actually works properly for NX-OS devices as opposed to the default gather_facts module that does not properly gather interface details.

Dependencies

You will first need to install the Python packages in the requirements.txt file. You can do this with: pip install -r requirements.txt. Then, you will need the cisco.ios and cisco.nxos Ansible collections installed to run this module. You can install these with: ansible-galaxy collection install cisco.ios cisco.nxos.
Finally, copy cisco_additional_facts.py into $HOME/.ansible/plugins/modules, which will make it available for Ansible to find and use the module.

Module Arguments

fact_type

• Description: Specify the type of fact(s) to gather.
• Supported types: all, interfaces, inventory, license, mac_address_table, routes, route_neighbors, vrfs
• Required: False
• Default: all
• Note: Recommend not using "all" as it will often result in a command timeout due to long-running operations. If you do need to run more than one fact type, it is best to run this module multiple times, once for each fact type.

Setup and Test

To test, I recommend using the Cisco Modeling Labs sandbox lab on Cisco Devnet, since it contains IOS and NX-OS devices already. When you run the ansible commands below, you will be prompted for the SSH password.

cd ansible-cisco_additional_facts
source ansible_env
ansible all -i INSERT_IP_ADDRESS_OR_DOMAIN_NAME, -c ansible.netcommon.network_cli -u INSERT_SSH_USERNAME -k -m cisco_additional_facts -e ansible_network_os=cisco.ios.ios -a fact_type=license
ansible all -i INSERT_IP_ADDRESS_OR_DOMAIN_NAME, -c ansible.netcommon.network_cli -u INSERT_SSH_USERNAME -k -m cisco_additonal_facts -e ansible_network_os=cisco.nxos.nxos -a fact_type=interfaces