adiroata / ise_device_inventory

extracts ISE devices and generates Ansible compatible inventory file

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|___ / \  |  |  \ /~~\ \__,  |  \__/ |  \ v0.1
                                          
- by Steven McNutt, CCIE #6495. @densem0de on twitterz

This tool extracts all of your devices from ISE and creates an Ansible compatible YAML inventory file.

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Installation and setup

Before you can fire up the tool you'll need to complete this short checklist:

• enable ERS in ISE

• write down the hostname of node that's hosting the ERS api on the ERS page

• create an account with ers operator rights

• in the config.yml, change the name of the ise_node to the address of the server you wrote down above. you can also set the ISE_NODE environment variable instead.

• (optional) configure the file_path setting in config.yml or setting the ISE_PATH environment variable.

• (optional) if you have more than 1000 devices increase the page_limit in config.yml or set the ISE_PAGE_LIMIT envrionment variable.

• (optional) set the ISE_USER and ISE_PASSWORD environment variables for unnatended operation such as part of a pipeline. if you don't set these the tool will prompt for the information.

• set up your python envronment, then run 'pip install -r requirements.txt'. This will grab the modules that the tool needs to run. strongly recommend virtual environments for most reliable results.

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Usage

• type:"python3 main.py". The program will connect to ISE and start downloading the device inventory.

• once ISE device extractor has processed the data, you'll see a "writing inventory to disk" message. at that point you are done.

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Caveats and things to note

• the tool will build an inventory with a group per location and per device type. You can combine them in Ansible with a host pattern. For example dc01:&routers would select all of the routers at site dc01. Check the Ansible documentation for further details.

• Ansible inventory files cannot have whitespace or dashes in group names. The tool will replace the location and device_type fields that have these characters with an underbar (_).

• All configurables can set as environment variables for automation use.

• No, you cannot store the username or password in the config file.

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Contributing and modifying

• If you would like to contribute or modify the program, there are some sample data structures in the data_ref folder to get you started.

• The samples were generated in an ISE development sandbox at https://devnetsandbox.cisco.com