Building network automation solutions

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 netlab lab topology.

Adding a GUI to a netlab 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).

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1. This would have been an awesome April 1st post; unfortunately Stefano created this functionality a few weeks too late. ↩︎

2. Tighter integration “is on the roadmap”. ↩︎