Nautobot and Device Lifecycle – Hardware – Part 1

This is part 1 of an ongoing series about using Nautobot and Nautobot’s Lifecycle Management Application to help you with your device hardware and software planning.

In this part we will dive into how Nautobot can help you by looking at the device model and device attributes.

What Is Device Lifecycle Planning?

If you are a network engineer or network automation engineer looking to automate or find a way to automate lifecycle planning, you should definitely understand Cisco’s PPDIOO – Design and Implementation.

If you want to learn more about PPDIOO you can follow this link: https://www.ciscopress.com/articles/article.asp?p=1608131&seqNum=3

For now, though, I want to talk about what some see as the “IT hardware lifecycle” planning model. This model is more condensed, and I feel it can be used for networking devices as well.

Plan – Engineers need to get an observation of current equipment that is in the network and see whether there is any older hardware that is a risk or needs to be replaced. Schedule repeating reviews (once a month or quarter) on equipment health and consider what to do as the next steps in replacing equipment.

Procure – Once planning is completed the procurement stage can begin. During this stage the cost of various pieces of equipment will be looked at and consideration given to other types of hardware that could be utilized. The outcome should be reviewed by the procurement team to determine whether the proposed purchases will be cost-effective.

Maintain – In this stage, operations and maintenance are done on the device hardware. This includes operations teams monitoring device health and remediating any hardware issues that may come along. During this time there might be hardware that ends up needing more work than normal and should be considered for replacement.

Dispose – How will you dispose of outdated equipment that’s being replaced, keeping in mind any security precautions or environmental precautions that must be followed.

Hardware lifecycle planning can be a daunting task for any size company. It doesn’t matter whether you have 20-100 devices or 20k-100k devices, staying up-to-date on hardware in your environment requires quite a bit of time and planning.

Let’s look at how Nautobot can help with that journey.

Importing Devices into Nautobot

First, you should have all the devices in Nautobot that you would like to track. You could add the devices manually, or you could use one of the many Nautobot applications (plugins) that will sync devices from another tool to Nautobot:

• Single Source of Truth (SSoT)
• Single Source of Truth – ServiceNow
• Single Source of Truth – ACI
• Single Source of Truth – Arista CloudVision
• Single Source of Truth – IPFabric

If you want to see more blog posts on SSoT click here.

After you get your device into Nautobot, you can see that it has your device type, platform (manufacturer), hostname, location, role, etc.

Nautobot’s Device Page

Here is an overview of what attributes a device can have:

Site

Helps with identifying hardware at specific locations.

• Region – This is the region that you can set for a group of sites.
• Tenant – A tenant represents a discrete grouping of resources used for administrative purposes.
• Facility ID – Name of the facility that is in the site, such as a building name.
• AS Number – Autonomous Number can be assigned to the site.
• Time Zone – Time zone where the site is located; this can help when you need to reach out to personnel at the location.
• Description – What you would like to call the site.
• Contact Info – Consists of items such as Physical Address, Shipping Address, Contact Name/Phone/Email, etc.
• Stats – Once everything is assigned to the site, an overall summary of what Racks, Devices, Prefixes, VLANs, Circuits, and Virtual Machines will be on the site homepage.

Rack

• Common – Site, Facility ID, Tenant, Status, Role, Serial number, Asset Tag.
• Devices – List of devices that are currently assigned to the rack. This is also shown in the rack diagram, and each device is clickable.
• Space Utilization – Amount of free space left in the cabinet. This is great for future planning or finding racks that are almost at 100%.
• Power Utilization – Amount of power being consumed by the Rack.
• Type – The type of rack configuration. This can be used to plan if you need to upgrade to bigger racks for the future.
• Width – Width of rack.
• Height – Height of rack.

Position

Physical location of the device in the Rack, which also can be seen in the rack overview page.

Tenant

A tenant represents a discrete grouping of resources used for administrative purposes.

• Description – Description of the tenant.
• Stats – An overall summary of what Racks, Devices, Prefixes, VLANs, Circuits, and Virtual Machines will be on the Tenant homepage.

Device Type

Device hardware type or model ID.

• Manufacturer – The vendor of said device type. This can be used to find out how many devices are tied to a specific vendor. If you are trying to remove a vendor from the network, this is an easy way find out how many device types of that vendor are in the network.
• Model Name – Model name of the device and also the slug that is easily callable when using Nautobot’s API or GraphQL features.
• Part Number – Part number for ordering purposes (also can be used to filter).
• Height – Height of device type.
• Parent/Child – Parent devices house child devices in device bays. Leave blank if this device type is neither a parent nor a child.
• Front/Rear Images – Really helpful for boots on the ground and to validate that they are looking at the correct device before removal during the last phase of the hardware lifecycle.
• Instances – All the devices, validated software, hardware notices that are tied to this specific device type.

Serial Number

Serial number of the device.

Role

Role of the device set by the user.

• Name – Name of the role that is set by the user.
• Devices – All the devices associated to that role.
• VMs – Any roles that are considered VMs.
• Color – The color of the banner that will show up in the overall device summary page. This color is set by the user.
• VM Role – Whether the role is considered to be a VM role or not.
• Description – Description of role.

Platform

Usually the manufacturer of the device, but can be set by the user.

IPv4/IPv6

Management address of the device. An IPv4 or IPv6 address space can be assigned.

VLANs

These are VLANs that are attached to the device and also are found in the IPAM portion of Nautobot. This could help when a certain VLAN needs to be removed; you can see all devices and racks attached to that VLAN.

• Common – Site, VLAN ID, Name, Tenant, Role, Description.
• Devices – All devices associated to that VLAN. Can be clicked on for more detail of the devices.
• Rack – All racks associated to that VLAN. Can be clicked on for more detail of the racks.
• Prefixes – All IP prefixes associated to the VLAN to ensure validation when VLANs have been removed.

Contracts

Any hardware contracts (relationship association object) that cover the device. This will be covered in depth more in the lifecycle app, but you could use this to see when current devices have a contract ending soon in order to decide whether to replace or continue to upgrade and renew the contract.

• Provider – Contract vendor.
• Start/End Date – Dates when contracts start and end. These dates are able to be filtered with GraphQL, API, or from contracts home page.
• Cost – Cost of the contract can be reviewed to see whether a new contract price should be negotiated (if devices drop to a certain point, which is part of lifecycle planning).
• Support Level – During the planning phase this can be looked at to see whether it should be greater or less based on how many devices are attached.
• Contract Type – Hardware or software type.
• Devices/Inventory Items – All device/inventory items attached to this contract.
• Contacts – Escalation and Service Contract Owner information.

Software Version

The software on the device (relationship association object). This will be covered more in-depth when looking at software lifecycle.

Images

You can store images for personnel to identify the device. Great for troubleshooting networking issues or replacing equipment.