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Ansible automation with solarwinds NCM module

Hello Guys,

Does anyone perform the Network automation using solarwinds NCM module and Ansible playbooks, If yes could you please help me with process. What needs to be checked first and how you achieved.

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Sriram_1

@adam.beedell @cheryl1 @mesverrum

cheryl1

I haven't done it personally but I found these resources:

First is a good discussion on here on THWACK. Its a bit older, but this level of customization and work with NCM, I'd be surprised if there are many significant changes, but still, keep that in mind, especially if any of the customization has been impacted by our Secure by Design initiative. Can devices be added to Solarwinds via Ansible? Is there an ansible module available for this

I also looked around on GitHub, we have a lot of presence there:https://github.com/dalrrard/ansible-solarwinds-inventory-plugin

Hope these help!

adam.beedell

Not as of yet, but I'm looking to start using ansible shortly. Dont have much network kit i could operate on though.

Sriram_1

Awesome. wanted to check if NCM capable of executing the scripts using git or ansible. if yes how can we establish the integration/communication between both NCM and Git.

DGNetops

I currently use Ansible to WINRM to my primary poller and then run everything via powershell script. Been using the Ansible module for windows powershell so the script is only in memory and not kept locally.

This has worked well for my framework with my primary needs being querying IPAM. I have started expanding to do supernet add, subnet add, etc and also expanding to do NCM executeScript jobs as well.

My workflow was to ensure Ansible could winrm into my server and that it had its own service account to do this to keep permissions low. I use Ansible Tower with AzureDevOps for my repository.

I also have CyberArk at my company to perform an AIM lookup to pass the API credentials. Ansible Tower itself also holds the WINRM credentials and does the AIM lookup for that as well.

I have an embedded playbook to import in my API credentials since Tower can only run one credential type per playbook so I had to create an AIM playbook and pass the password as a fact at runtime to the host I was targeting in the inventory.

I also have a solarwinds local account that my API uses so if someone were to get the service account password for the winrm connection they still wouldnt have the API creds.

I also had to install the swis-powershell module to my primary polling engine since I am using powershell. I also have just needed to install a public .Net Assembly called iPNetwork2 so I can do some more advanced subnet/supernet comparisons etc for my IPAM workflows.