Cisco Industrial Network Director SMS Alerting

This project utilises Cisco Industrial Network Director (IND) - a network management tool specifically for operational technology networks, this script acts as an extension of Industrial Network Director to allow for the inbuilt alerts to be sent via an SMS. When a new alert is recieved on Industrial Network Director this script will utilise the Twilio API

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/cloud-systems-management/industrial-network-director/index.html

Typically management of these networks can either be at a site level where operational engineers may not include tools such as Industrial Network Director in their day to day workflows. Therefore building this extension with SMS will notify OT users proactively to alert and reduce time fault finding.

Prerequsites for this project - Python 2.7 or later, Twilio account

To run these scripts you will need an instance of Industrial Network Director running. dcloud.cisco.com has an "Cisco Industrial Network Director v3" demo which can be used for this integration or alternatively you can download IND from the cisco.com website, a fresh install has a 90 day trial license. https://software.cisco.com/download/home/286310815/type/286310951/release/1.6.1

Steps

Step 1

The first step to running this project is to create an account on Twilio.com, from there you will need to create a project for programmable SMS. To get to grips with Twilio, visit Twilio.com and review the documentation and user guides which will walk through the process of getting started with Twilio Once the project has been created you will be given an Twilio mobile number, auth token and account sid. Save these for later as we will need it when we start the script.

Please note, by default Twilio will create these projects as a trial account. You will need to follow Twilio processes to move this from trial to production.

Step 2

Before you run the python script to set up the alerting make sure you have the following:

1. IP address of IND system
2. Username for IND system
3. Password for IND system
4. Mobile number for alerts to be sent to
5. Sending mobile number, registered on Twilio
6. Twilio Account SID
7. Twilio auth token

Once you have the following information, run the python script by issuing the command python IND_Alerts.py and follow the on screen prompts. Once the script recieves the above 7 variables it will then move into a listening mode.

Step 3

As soon as the process moves into listening mode you should then recieve a text on the registered mobile phone number confirming that the script is running and the mobile is registered. The script will then run in the background monitoring the IND system, in the event of any new alerts generated it will trigger an SMS alert.