ThousandEyes Instant Test Chatbot

The ThousandEyes Instant Test Chatbot allows a user to launch Enterprise Endpoint or Enterprise Agent Instant Tests for Select Applications or a Custom URL through a Webex Bot. This allows a user to independently launch tests and proactively gather data before reporting problems to a help desk.

The bot has the following options (and their tests) pre-encoded:

• Office 365 (http-server)
• Webex Audio (http-server & agent-to-server)
• Webex Video (http-server & agent-to-server)
• Cisco SalesForce (http-server)
• Custom URL (http-server)

Note: All URLs are accurate at the time of publishing, but may change over time. URLs can be updated at the top of the test_creation.py file and are mapped to the help card options in the test_selector() method.

Contacts

• Trevor Maco
• Josh Ingeniero
• Hemang Shah
• Yi Ren

Solution Components

• ThousandEyes
• Webex Bot
• Python 3.11
• Flask

Prerequisites

ThousandEyes

This Webex Bot assumes a ThousandEyes deployment exists with at least one Endpoint Agent and/or one Enterprise Agent.

To use the ThousandEyes APIs, a Bearer Token is required for a user with the API access permissions. To generate a Bearer Token, go to Account Settings > Users and Roles > User API Tokens and generate a OAuth Bearer Token. Note this token.

Webex Bot

To create a Webex Bot, follow this workflow:

1. Log in to developer.webex.com
2. Click on your avatar and select My Webex Apps
3. Click Create a New App
4. Click Create a Bot to start the wizard
5. Following the instructions of the wizard, provide your bot's name, username, and icon
6. Once the form is filled out, click Add Bot and you will be given an access token
7. Copy the access token and store it safely. Please note that the API key will be shown only once for security purposes. In case you lose the key, then you have to revoke the key and generate a new key.

Additional Webex Bot documentation can be found here.

Webhooks

The app needs to be reachable on port 4000 from the public internet for Webex Webhooks to be received and processed. Any option is valid like AWS Lambda, Heroku, GCP, etc. Ngrok is used here to expose the local app for simplicity.

ngrok

The flask app runs on http://localhost:4000 by default, so it requires a Ngrok forwarding address to port 4000 to recieve the webhooks.

Follow these instructions to set up ngrok:

1. Create a free account or login to Ngrok.
2. Retrieve your auth token by navigating to Getting Started > Your Authtoken on the menu on the left-hand side. Copy the token on this page.
3. Then install the client library depending on your OS here.
4. Once you have ngrok installed, update the ngrok configuration file with your auth token by running the following command on the terminal/command prompt:

ngrok authtoken [yourtoken]

replacing [yourtoken] with the authtoken you copied in Step 2.

5. Start the ngrok tunnel for port 4000 with the command:

ngrok http 4000

Installation/Configuration

1. Clone this repository with git clone [repository name]
2. Rename the .env_sample file to .env. Rename config_sample.py to config.py.
3. Add the Webex Bot Token to .env and Webex Bot Email to config.py:

BOT_TOKEN=''

BOT_EMAIL = ""

4. Add the public facing app url to config.py (ex: Ngrok forwarding address)

WEBHOOK_BASE_URL = ""

5. Add the ThousandEyes bearer token to .env

THOUSAND_EYES_TOKEN=''

6. Set up a Python virtual environment. Make sure Python 3 is installed in your environment, and if not, you may download Python here. Once Python 3 is installed in your environment, you can activate the virtual environment with the instructions found here.
7. Install the requirements with pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Usage

1. Launch the bot with the command:

python3 app.py

To use the bot, start a conversation by adding the bot to a 1-1 or Group space.

Send the command network-help to display the primary card for launching tests:

This card requires 2 things:

• A ThousandEyes Agent (Enterprise or Endpoint)

To use an Enterprise Agent, enter the Agent Name as seen on the ThousandEyes Dashboard:

To use an Endpoint Agent, enter the Agent Hostname as seen on the ThousandEyes Dashboard:

• A Target Application (pre-built or custom url)

After clicking submit, the proper test will run, and after some time the results will be returned to the Webex space in the form of cards. 2 types of results exist: Success, and Failure.

• Success: A 2XX HTTP Response code from the target url
• Failure: A Non 2XX HTTP Response code from the target url

The code can easily be updated and amended to consider metrics during state determination as well, like: loss, latency, etc. Refer to generate_result.py > generate_result() to modify the determination code.

Example test results are shown below:

• Enterprise Agent Success:

• Endpoint Agent Success:

• Failure:

Screenshots

LICENSE

Provided under Cisco Sample Code License, for details see LICENSE

CODE_OF_CONDUCT

Our code of conduct is available here

CONTRIBUTING

See our contributing guidelines here

DISCLAIMER:

Please note: This script is meant for demo purposes only. All tools/ scripts in this repo are released for use "AS IS" without any warranties of any kind, including, but not limited to their installation, use, or performance. Any use of these scripts and tools is at your own risk. There is no guarantee that they have been through thorough testing in a comparable environment and we are not responsible for any damage or data loss incurred with their use.
You are responsible for reviewing and testing any scripts you run thoroughly before use in any non-testing environment.