Ansible: Cisco APIC Health Check with Cisco WebEx BoT Integration

Raw Command Output from Ansible Delivered to Cisco WebEx Teams Rooms

Objective

Imagine a situation wherein you need periodic output of a command ( running on your servers or network equipment), what do you do presently, login to the device and get it periodically or as and when needed, or run a script and check the outputs, what if the same output was delivered to you on your enterprise messaging platform. For this example, I will be using Cisco ACI, Cisco WebEx Teams and Ansible Tower. The same script can be extended to majority of Cisco devices.

What is a Chat Bot?

It is a software that conducts a conversation via over texts like a human being, it simulates a human interaction. For more information about WebEx Team ChatBot: -
https://developer.webex.com/docs/bots
I am also training the chatbot to answer Level 1 Network Queries, using Dialogflow.
I am using Paramiko to connect to the devices and Cisco_Spark Module of Ansible to send the outputs to a Cisco WebEx Chat Room.

Requirements

To use this code, you will need:
• Ansible Tower or Ansible (scheduling options are only available with Ansible Tower)
• Cisco WebEx Teams Account and Room ID
• Paramiko library
• Cisco_Spark Module on Ansible
• Cisco Devices (Router / Switches / APIC etc. )

Using the Playbook

1. Download the file ACI_Controller_Health.yml
2. Modify the host name to point to your device i.e. router / switch / apic etc
3. Modify the below line of code to execute the command as per your device: -

raw: "show controller" # Any Command that you wish to execute
Example commands are

• “show process cpu history” *
• “show logg | i keyword” *

4. Login to https://developer.webex.com/
5. Create a Bot
6. Add this bot to the room where you wish to send the messages
7. Populate the below mentioned information from the webex developer portal to the file ACI_Controller_Health.yml

connection: local
gather_facts: False
tasks:
- name: Sending message to room # Sending the Command output to the room, you can the RoomID and Personal Token from WebEx Developer Portal
cisco_spark:
recipient_type: roomId
recipient_id: {{roomID}} #Room ID of the room you wish to send the message to
message_type: text
personal_token: {{token}} #Token from the bot you created and was generated during the process.

8. The scripts can be executed as standalone from ansible by executing ansible-playbook ACI_Controller_Health.yml -v
9. Once the step 8 is successful, the same script can be scheduled on Ansible Tower for periodic delivery to chat room.

Lab Topology: