Generating daily report for Config Diff of Network devices

I solved this with the REST API -- I have a script that pulls all the config instances, then commits them into a git repo (one per device group in my case).  I use GitLab with an email push trigger, so I get reports on updates more or less as they occur, but obviously that could be handled other ways.  I find this beneficial for many reasons, including:

* keep a separate copy out of LM so some errant action in LM does not destroy config data and history
* enable searching for configuration elements across multiple files (impossible within the UI)
* build tools to validate configs against baseline templates or other sorts of analysis
* generate way better diff results (the current UI diff viewer REALLY needs a rewrite)
* I get to find out all the times LMConfig flakes out, like when it zeroes out config instances if NVRAM is temporarily unavailable

I would like to post those here, but you can't post text files it seems.  Will see if I can get those into github....

Hi Mnagel,

Thanks for the reply. Can you please share us the script/GIT Repo URL to pull the config instances so that I can implement in my environment and check it.

Regards

Kuldip

I solved this with the REST API -- I have a script that pulls all the config instances, then commits them into a git repo (one per device group in my case).  I use GitLab with an email push trigger, so I get reports on updates more or less as they occur, but obviously that could be handled other ways.  I find this beneficial for many reasons, including:

* keep a separate copy out of LM so some errant action in LM does not destroy config data and history
* enable searching for configuration elements across multiple files (impossible within the UI)
* build tools to validate configs against baseline templates or other sorts of analysis
* generate way better diff results (the current UI diff viewer REALLY needs a rewrite)
* I get to find out all the times LMConfig flakes out, like when it zeroes out config instances if NVRAM is temporarily unavailable

I would like to post those here, but you can't post text files it seems.  Will see if I can get those into github....

On 5/30/2018 at 3:32 AM, Kuldip Mitra said:

Hi Mnagel,

Thanks for the reply. Can you please share us the script/GIT Repo URL to pull the config instances so that I can implement in my environment and check it.

 

Regards

Kuldip

 

@Kuldip Mitra I was trying to find a way to easily sync just part of my repo without manual maintenance, but for now I did the manual method.  The better way can wait a bit. 

Please see https://github.com/willingminds/lmapi-scripts for the scripts.  Hopefully will work for you without too much pain, but definitely no training wheels attached :).

On 6/1/2018 at 3:30 PM, mnagel said:

I solved this with the REST API -- I have a script that pulls all the config instances, then commits them into a git repo (one per device group in my case).  I use GitLab with an email push trigger, so I get reports on updates more or less as they occur, but obviously that could be handled other ways.  I find this beneficial for many reasons, including:

* keep a separate copy out of LM so some errant action in LM does not destroy config data and history
* enable searching for configuration elements across multiple files (impossible within the UI)
* build tools to validate configs against baseline templates or other sorts of analysis
* generate way better diff results (the current UI diff viewer REALLY needs a rewrite)
* I get to find out all the times LMConfig flakes out, like when it zeroes out config instances if NVRAM is temporarily unavailable

I would like to post those here, but you can't post text files it seems.  Will see if I can get those into github....

@Kuldip Mitra I was trying to find a way to easily sync just part of my repo without manual maintenance, but for now I did the manual method.  The better way can wait a bit. 

Please see https://github.com/willingminds/lmapi-scripts for the scripts.  Hopefully will work for you without too much pain, but definitely no training wheels attached :).

I just posted some updates to the above repo after some time battling limitations in the underlying ConfigSource code.  Unfortunately, I have had very little success getting fixes implemented, and I am loathe to take over full local support of the ConfigSource code until merge/library support is ready, so I implemented workarounds to avoid frequent false checkins within my git sync tool.