Here’s another idea from the Building Network Automation Solutions online course: Ruben Tripiana decided to implement a latency measurement tool. His playbook takes a list of managed devices from Ansible inventory, generates a set of unique device pairs, measures latency between them, and produces a summary report (see also his description of the project).

Of course, there’s a tool out there that can do that (ToDD comes to mind), and quite often it’s better to use a free or commercial tool than to develop your own… but that’s not the idea behind the automation online course. In that course, I want to teach network engineers how to build their own tools when they need them, and make their life easier by building tools instead of wasting their time on repetitive manual tasks.

Want to become one of them? There are still a few Enthusiast tickets for the Spring 2018 course.