Automating Network Configuration Backups

In the last couple of posts, we have heavily focused on Ansible and its usage vis-a-vis Network Management. Today, we will be utilizing what we have gone through so far to tackle a very common real world use case. We will be using Ansible to Automate daily/weekly/monthly backups of Network devices.

It is recommended to have a sound understanding of Linux OS and its file structure, if one is really interested in getting a good grasp on Ansible. The order of events that I personally like to go with, is given below.

1. Define the Objective
2. Why the need ?
3. Prepare the host file
4. Write the Playbook
5. Execute the Playbook
6. Taking a notch further if possible

1. Objective –

Automate daily/weekly/monthly backups of Network devices

2. Why the need ? –

In order to ensure a healthy IT operations environment with suitable disaster recovery mechanisms in place, it is essential to maintain a good & reliable backup of the configuration database. We always aim to avoid any system failures by keeping monitoring checks & balances in place but, no amount of monitoring or proactive maintenance can ensure 100% availability of production systems. Sooner or later, we will encounter a system failure and how quickly we manage to recover from such a failure would be a critical factor in defining the robustness of our processes.

In the context of Network Management, one of the most common factors to accelerate the recovery of production network is ensuring that we have a reliable and up to date backups of the running configuration of routers/switches/gateways. There are plenty of third party tools available in the market that can schedule backups of network devices at different frequencies/intervals. If you don’t already have a system in place to accomplish this objective and have the money then feel free to go for such tools. But if you want to resolve this problem in house without having your team members manually copying “show run” into Notepad all day long or help your customer without spending a dime while simultaneously learning something new then follow along.

In my latest blog post, I delve deeper into the rest of the steps and explain the Playbook structure, host files and how we can use cron jobs to automatically schedule the execution of playbooks to help us achieve our objective of taking backups of network devices at regular intervals. Please visit the following link & provide your feedback.

Automating Network Configuration Backups