ACI Report Shell

Interactive shell application to gather information and generate reports from a Cisco ACI environment.

Use Case Description

Working with the Cisco APIC GUI can be cumbersome at times, especially when you need a quick overview and are used to simple CLI show commands.
In addition there's no sane and fast way to export data presented in the GUI to an Excel spreadsheet.

This is where ACI Report Shell comes into play. The goal of the application is to provide some simple CLI show commands to the user which can be used to
gather configuration or status information from the ACI fabric. If desired, the output from a show command can be exported to Excel. This can be helpful if you want to use the data elsewhere. For Example as an input file for configuration changes.

At the moment only a few commands are available. Future releases will include a larger set of commands.

Installation

The code is built and tested against Python 3.8 but should also work with older 3.x versions of Python.

The main dependencies are:

cmd2
coloredlogs
configparser
openpyxl
pandas
requests

With poetry

If Poetry is available on your system, you can install the software as follows:

poetry install
chmod +x ./aci-shell.py

Without poetry

Otherwise you can use Pip to install the software as follows:

pip install -r requirements.txt
chmod +x ./aci-shell.py

Configuration

Some aspects of the application can be configured in the config.ini file. The following settings are available:

Section	Setting	Default	Description
common	report_dir	./reports	Path to report directory
security	allow_unverified_https_request	true	Allow unverified HTTPS requests
logging	log_file	./logs/aci-report-shell.log	Path to log file
logging	log_level	INFO	Logging level. Allowed values: DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, CRITICAL
logging	log_rotation	W0	Weekday when new logfile will be written Allowed values: W0 - W6, where W0 = Monday
logging	log_backup	25	Number of log files which will be kept before they get deleted

Usage

To start the application simply open a terminal window and run aci-shell.py

$ ./aci-shell.py

You will then be asked to enter the FQDN of your APIC.

Enter APIC FQDN: sandboxapicdc.cisco.com

Once you enterd the FQDN and hit "enter" you will be presented with the welcome screen.

Welcome to the ACI shell
Please login with "connect -u [username]"
>>>

General

Since the application is using cmd2 as the CLI, you can use the built-in features such as:

tab completion of commands
show help for a command (-h or --help command)
Searchable command history (history and Ctrl+r command)
Pipe command output to shell commands with |
Redirect command output to file with >, >>
Command aliasing similar to bash alias command

Connect to APIC

To establish a connection to the APIC, use the connect command and provide the username with the -u argument.

You will then be asked to enter the password for the user.

>>> connect -u admin
APIC URL: https://sandboxapicdc.cisco.com/api/
Enter password for user admin:

Disconnect from APIC

To disconnect from the APIC you can use the disconnect command.

>>> disconnect

Show all EPGs in all Tenants

For a report of all EPGs in all Tenants, use the show_epg_all command.

>>> show_epg_all

Show interface status of a switch

For a report on the interface status of a switch, use the show_interface_status command.

>>> show_interface_status -p 1 -n 101

Show EPGs deployed on a switch interface

For a report of all deployed EPGs on a switch interface, use the show_interface_epg command.

>>> show_interface_epg -p 1 -n 101 -i eth1/38

Export report to Excel

Every report can be exported to an Excel spreadsheet. Simply add the -e or --export argument to the show commands.

Example:

>>> show_epg_all --export aci-report.xlsx

By default the report will be saved to the ./reports directory.

You can save multiple reports to the same file. Simply use the same filename in the -e argument.
Each show command will create a new worksheet.

For demonstration purposes there's a sample report in the reports directory.

DevNet Sandbox

To try out the application you can use the Cisco ACI Sandbox Lab.
Sandbox details such as username & password can be found here.

Known issues

Currently this application will not run on Windows directly. But you can use Windows Subsystem for Linux instead.
Linux and macOS are supported out of the box, as long as you have Python3 installed.

Getting help

If you have questions, concerns, bug reports, etc., please create an issue against this repository.

Author(s)

This project was written and is maintained by the following individuals:

Stephan Lüscher stephan.luescher@anyweb.ch