Adding Nodes

Created by Sanjay Kumar, Modified on Wed, 4 Sep at 8:15 AM by Sanjay Kumar

Introduction/Summary

The first step in network automation is to update the inventory.

NetYCE has two types of inventory, one is called CMDB (Configuration Management DataBase) nodes and the other is YCE (Source of Truth) nodes

CMDB Nodes need minimum essential information while adding the node. (like node name, vendor, IP address/fdqn, Domain that holds credentials to login)

YCE Nodes can store all types of network information about the node as shown below.

It's recommended to start with CMDB Nodes. Let's understand how to add a CMDB Node to the inventory.

For this example, we shall consider adding nodes of the below topology.

Let's begin adding our first device:

Below are the details that we have about switch1 from the picture

Hostname: switch1

Vendor: Arista

fqdn/IP: 192.168.33.10

We would also need domain information to add the device to the database.

Domain: lab_test (Refer to the section Adding Domain in this article)

The domain is a place where several vital information relevant to a group of nodes is stored.

Like tacacs servers, syslog, snmp servers, usernames, passwords...

Option 1. Adding a node through GUI:

Go to: Inventory -> CMDB -> New ->

Enter the “Hostname” as “switch1”

Clicking on this we get the additional fields to fill in with the details we have:

That adds the node switch1 to the database

Option 2. Adding nodes through CSV API

Let’s proceed to add the rest of the nodes and use another approach by using the CSV API. This is the proposed way to add the nodes.

First, download the CSV API file from our wiki. Go to the first sheet named addCmdbNode

Then, fill in the details of the rest of the nodes (Nodename, vendtor_type and IP)

The text under the Orange heading is mandatory and fixed text. While we can update the fields under green headings based on each node’s information.

Fields under Yellow are optional.

To import the CSV data, copy the text from the CSV API and paste into the NetYCE CSV API COMMANDS section as below:

Proceed with the “Execute” that would add the nodes to the CMDB.

Verify the nodes

We can verify if the nodes are added successfully as below:

Go to: Inventory -> CMDB

Adding a Domain

As earlier stated, a domain is a crucial place where much of the vital information about the group of nodes is stored.

In this case, we are creating a new domain named lab_test and saving the credentials to log in to the devices.

Under Users, define the Rme user and Rme password for be credentials to be used to login to the nodes we added.

If there are enable passwords to be defined, these can be defined under the Management tab.