Everything Is Better with a GUI (even netsim-tools)
Some people think that everything is better with Bluetooth. They’re clearly wrong; according to the ancient wisdom of product managers working for networking vendors, everything is better with a GUI.
Now imagine adding network topology visualizer and GUI-based device access with in-browser SSH to an intent-based infrastructure-as-code virtual network function labbing tool. How’s that for a Bullshit Bingo winner1?
On a more serious note, Stefano Sasso figured out the configuration file format of Graphite (Web UI/graphing tool used with containerlab) and created an output module that generates a Graphite configuration file from netsim-tools lab topology.
BGP anycast lab displayed by Graphite
Adding a GUI to a netsim-tools lab is as easy as 1-2-3:
- Create Graphite configuration file with netlab create -o graphite2
- Start the lab with netlab up
- Start the Graphite container.
While you can use Graphite to create lab topology regardless of the virtualization provider, SSH access works only with libvirt-based lab (more details).
To use this functionality, upgrade netsim-tools to release 1.2.1 with pip3 install --upgrade netsim-tools.
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This would have been an awesome April 1st post; unfortunately Stefano created this functionality a few weeks too late. ↩︎
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Tighter integration “is on the roadmap”. ↩︎