Introducing Nautobot 3.1: An Inside Look

Welcome, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us today. We’re going to give everybody just a few minutes to get into the session, so please stand by for a couple of minutes, and we’ll go ahead and get started in just a moment. Kristee, while we’re waiting, why don’t we go ahead and pop up the poll if it’s not already up? For those of you just joining, thank you again. We’ll get started in just a moment. If you’re joining us and you haven’t already, please, take a moment to look at the poll we’ve put up.

Very interested to understand, based on our Folks who are joining us, where you are in your automation journey, where you are in your use of Nautobot, so appreciate if you’d just take a moment, fill out the poll, and again, we’ll go ahead and get started here in just a moment. Thank you, everyone. Appreciate you joining. Just waiting to make sure who we’ve got in the, in the, participants. We know there are quite a few people signed up for this. We’ll make sure everybody has a chance to join and get in here.

So again, we’ll be starting in just a moment. For those folks just joining us again, there is a poll up. Please take a moment to fill out the poll. While that happens, I’ll go ahead and take care of a little bit of, Housekeeping as we go along here. Again, for those of you joining us, haven’t joined us before for webinars, this is a live webinar. There will be a Q&A period at the end.

If, during the course of the webinar, at any moment, you’ve got a question or you’re curious about something, you can use the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. The chat function will not work for you, but please use the Q&A function. And we’ll go ahead and get those questions queued up. For questions we can answer in line in the course of our conversation, we’ll go ahead and do that.

And for those questions that feel like they need a longer answer, or sort of more involved, we’ll go ahead and hold those to the end and dive into those at the end. And with that, we’re going to go ahead and get started. Thank you very much for joining us today.

As the title site says, we’re here to really talk about Nautobot 3.1, and highlight for folks a lot of the new capabilities that come with 3.1, and dive into some of the commercial offerings that make this release very, very important to us in terms of our move towards an open-core approach to Nautobot. Next slide, Chris, please. We’ve actually got a few hosts today. If, for some reason, you weren’t, or you were expecting Tim Schreyack, I do apologize, you’re not getting Tim today, you’re getting me.

I will do my best to, to try and channel Tim feeling, Tim’s ability today. He’s a little bit under the weather, and so I had to jump in as a pinch hitter. And in joining me will be Chris Murray. Chris Murray will actually be running the demos for us. So, for those of you who know Tim, please let him know that it took two of us to fill his spot on today’s webinar. He’ll appreciate knowing that.

In addition to myself, Jeff Bradbury, we’ve got Brian O’Sullivan, VP of Product Management, here to talk about his 3.1 and what a great job we did getting 3.1 out the door, give him a chance to bask in the glow of his success there. And then again, as I mentioned, Chris will be joining us a little bit later. Chris Murray’s our senior marketing engineer, helps us with all of our technical marketing. And puts all of our demos together, so you couldn’t have a better person here. Run the demos for us. Next, Chris.

Quick agenda for today. Again, we’ve done the introduction, so we’re through that. Again, we’re going to dive into the Nautobot 3.1 features here pretty quickly. Let Brian take the spotlight here in a couple of slides. Then Brian’s going to talk very, very quickly about what’s coming in 3.2, give you a little preview of where the team’s focusing their efforts, and then, as I said. We’ll lean into that demo, showcase a couple of the major new capabilities in 3.1, and then open it up to a Q&A.

So, for those of you who know Nautobot and are long-time users, you’ll know this very well. For those of you who are newer to the platform, do want to highlight, you know, Nautobot really is the only solution out there that combines both a network source of truth and a network automation platform. It’s, it’s a… we like it, you know, obviously it’s ours.

We’re very, very serious about the, the platform and how we develop it and how relevant it is, to solving the network automation challenges, that we all hope to, hope to address, and how we hope to push network automation into our operations environment.

But I do want to just highlight, just for a moment, how we How integral that network source of truth is, and how… having that network source of truth, and using an intent-based networking approach to your automation. really does set the standard for a successful automation strategy.

So, just highlighting there the two sides of Nautobot, the network source of truth and the automation platform, and the fact that we have a series of applications that then wrap around that core that add additional capability and allow you to sort of jumpstart your automation journey. With regards to deployment options, we have two major variations on how you can deploy Nautobot. We have a self-managed option that allows you to deploy it in your own environments, that could be on-prem, or in your own cloud.

And we’ve got a SaaS version in Nautobot Cloud that allows you to take all the advantages of a SaaS platform, and it comes with some additional features and capabilities not available in the other approach.

So, again, no matter how you’re thinking about deploying Nautobot, we have some variation, some variability that allows you to take advantage of the appropriate platform for where you are in your automation journey, and your preferred approach, whether that be an on-prem or self-managed approach, or a SaaS-based approach. Next slide. Alright, before we hop into 3.1 and diving into the details here, let’s just take a moment, Kristee, if you can bring the poll back up, just dive into that poll for a second.

The poll results, I think, are really quite interesting. We’ve got a huge amount of, variation in folks who are here. I think, you know, the 45% of you who are obviously running Nautobot in production, thank you for that. Very, very pleased to see that. We know a lot of you join these webinars to sort of stay updated on what’s coming and get highlights of how to apply the newest capabilities.

For those of you who are actively testing, hopefully this will help you answer some questions you may have, and maybe provide some guideways to where you’re going next. For those of you just exploring, same situation. Hopefully, we’ll open your eyes to what’s capable, what’s possible, and how Nautobot can help solve your automation and network automation, or network operations, challenges. And then lastly, for those of you new. Welcome to the show, love having you here.

That 26% of you really, really appreciate having you join us for the first time. Brian, I’m going to turn this over to you, but just very quickly, anything you want to add to the poll?
Very interested to understand, based on our Folks who are joining us, where you are in your automation journey, where you are in your use of Nautobot, so appreciate if you’d just take a moment, fill out the poll, and again, we’ll go ahead and get started here in just a moment. Thank you, everyone. Appreciate you joining. Just waiting to make sure who we’ve got in the, in the, participants. We know there are quite a few people signed up for this. We’ll make sure everybody has a chance to join and get in here.

So again, we’ll be starting in just a moment. For those folks just joining us again, there is a poll up. Please take a moment to fill out the poll. While that happens, I’ll go ahead and take care of a little bit of, Housekeeping as we go along here. Again, for those of you joining us, haven’t joined us before for webinars, this is a live webinar. There will be a Q&A period at the end.

If, during the course of the webinar, at any moment, you’ve got a question or you’re curious about something, you can use the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. The chat function will not work for you, but please use the Q&A function. And we’ll go ahead and get those questions queued up. For questions we can answer in line in the course of our conversation, we’ll go ahead and do that.

And for those questions that feel like they need a longer answer, or sort of more involved, we’ll go ahead and hold those to the end and dive into those at the end. And with that, we’re going to go ahead and get started. Thank you very much for joining us today.

As the title site says, we’re here to really talk about Nautobot 3.1, and highlight for folks a lot of the new capabilities that come with 3.1, and dive into some of the commercial offerings that make this release very, very important to us in terms of our move towards an open-core approach to Nautobot. Next slide, Chris, please. We’ve actually got a few hosts today. If, for some reason, you weren’t, or you were expecting Tim Schreyack, I do apologize, you’re not getting Tim today, you’re getting me.

I will do my best to, to try and channel Tim feeling, Tim’s ability today. He’s a little bit under the weather, and so I had to jump in as a pinch hitter. And in joining me will be Chris Murray. Chris Murray will actually be running the demos for us. So, for those of you who know Tim, please let him know that it took two of us to fill his spot on today’s webinar. He’ll appreciate knowing that.

In addition to myself, Jeff Bradbury, we’ve got Brian O’Sullivan, VP of Product Management, here to talk about his 3.1 and what a great job we did getting 3.1 out the door, give him a chance to bask in the glow of his success there. And then again, as I mentioned, Chris will be joining us a little bit later. Chris Murray’s our senior marketing engineer, helps us with all of our technical marketing. And puts all of our demos together, so you couldn’t have a better person here. Run the demos for us. Next, Chris.

Quick agenda for today. Again, we’ve done the introduction, so we’re through that. Again, we’re going to dive into the Nautobot 3.1 features here pretty quickly. Let Brian take the spotlight here in a couple of slides. Then Brian’s going to talk very, very quickly about what’s coming in 3.2, give you a little preview of where the team’s focusing their efforts, and then, as I said. We’ll lean into that demo, showcase a couple of the major new capabilities in 3.1, and then open it up to a Q&A.

So, for those of you who know Nautobot and are long-time users, you’ll know this very well. For those of you who are newer to the platform, do want to highlight, you know, Nautobot really is the only solution out there that combines both a network source of truth and a network automation platform. It’s, it’s a… we like it, you know, obviously it’s ours.

We’re very, very serious about the, the platform and how we develop it and how relevant it is, to solving the network automation challenges, that we all hope to, hope to address, and how we hope to push network automation into our operations environment.

But I do want to just highlight, just for a moment, how we How integral that network source of truth is, and how… having that network source of truth, and using an intent-based networking approach to your automation. really does set the standard for a successful automation strategy.

So, just highlighting there the two sides of Nautobot, the network source of truth and the automation platform, and the fact that we have a series of applications that then wrap around that core that add additional capability and allow you to sort of jumpstart your automation journey. With regards to deployment options, we have two major variations on how you can deploy Nautobot. We have a self-managed option that allows you to deploy it in your own environments, that could be on-prem, or in your own cloud.

And we’ve got a SaaS version in Nautobot Cloud that allows you to take all the advantages of a SaaS platform, and it comes with some additional features and capabilities not available in the other approach.

So, again, no matter how you’re thinking about deploying Nautobot, we have some variation, some variability that allows you to take advantage of the appropriate platform for where you are in your automation journey, and your preferred approach, whether that be an on-prem or self-managed approach, or a SaaS-based approach. Next slide. Alright, before we hop into 3.1 and diving into the details here, let’s just take a moment, Kristee, if you can bring the poll back up, just dive into that poll for a second.

The poll results, I think, are really quite interesting. We’ve got a huge amount of, variation in folks who are here. I think, you know, the 45% of you who are obviously running Nautobot in production, thank you for that. Very, very pleased to see that. We know a lot of you join these webinars to sort of stay updated on what’s coming and get highlights of how to apply the newest capabilities.

For those of you who are actively testing, hopefully this will help you answer some questions you may have, and maybe provide some guideways to where you’re going next. For those of you just exploring, same situation. Hopefully, we’ll open your eyes to what’s capable, what’s possible, and how Nautobot can help solve your automation and network automation, or network operations, challenges. And then lastly, for those of you new. Welcome to the show, love having you here.

That 26% of you really, really appreciate having you join us for the first time. Brian, I’m going to turn this over to you, but just very quickly, anything you want to add to the poll?

No, not at all. No, I…

a few ways.

That’s right, that’s right, I’m done. It is… it is good. I think it’s good to see the… the range of folks that are doing it. You know, do try to talk with a lot of customers that are in different places in this journey, and I think… talking about different places, I think that dovetails well with what we’re talking about here.

So, we have introduced commercial offerings into Nautobot 3.1, and it actually goes fairly in line with some of these, these, you know, categories, tiers, whatever you want to call them, that we see customers in. So, Nautobot Professional, which is that, that first tier. First off, there’s a ton of stuff, as you can kind of see there, a lot of, lot of, orange check is, check boxes there. We’ll go into, don’t worry, we’ll go into in detail on, on what is actually included in 3.1.

But this is kind of the tier for folks who are beginning that automation journey, and kind of beginning on what it is they’re doing, building out. They may be newer to Nautobot, they may be familiar with it, but just kind of, you know, taking advantage of our support functionality. So there’s a lot that’s there with professional itself.

The level above that, and as you’ll notice. the tiers and the bundles build upon themselves, so Nautobot Enterprise includes everything in Professional, and then includes more stuff. Nautobot Cloud includes everything in Enterprise, and then includes more stuff. But for Nautobot Enterprise, now that’s for folks who are doing more advanced automation outcomes. So there are… there is more functionality that’s included in that enterprise layer.

And then for cloud, this goes back to that earlier slide that Jeff alluded to. with, you know, we’re agnostic as to whether you want to deploy it yourself on-prem and be responsible for a self-managed solution, or whether you want to take advantage of Nautobot Cloud. And in that case, there are advantages. You have much quicker time to value, there’s less overhead, because we’ll take care of the deployments for you, you can deploy multiple Nautobot, etc. So there are advantages to cloud in general.

And then there’s also additional functionality that we kind of built in there to be able to provide value at that layer. So again, whatever kind of stage in the journey you’re in, I think there’s something that we’ve tried to make available to you and valuable to you in each of those. Alright. So, what… let’s actually talk about what’s really in the release. First off, Nautobot Core. Nautobot Core is the foundation of everything we’re doing. We’re continuously adding functionality, Nautobot Core.

No exceptions here for 3.1. The main things, kind of highlighted. The first thing on the left, the dependent, object creation. I think this is huge. This is something where, really makes it easier and simpler for folks to. utilize the product. And folks who’ve heard me talk about, you know, what we’re doing thematically, what we’re doing strategically for Nautobot, this absolutely dovetails there. Improving the user experience is the single top thing that we’re looking to do with the solution itself.

And so what we’re doing on the left there, that dependent object creation, is allowing you to, what’s showing here is someone who is creating, a device, they need to create a role, and then all of a sudden, they realize they don’t have a role there. They can now go in and just add a new role. You click on the plus button, you can add a new role, it’s added in there.

Before, what had happened, previously to 3-1, you would do that, but you had to dance out of what you were doing, go into role, create it, go back into where you are. So really, again, trying to simplify things and accelerate the operations by improving the user experience. On a related note, on the right, the quick job execution, jobs are not changing, jobs are still there, job results are there, you can view everything in great detail.

But there are some jobs, in the example shown here at the ping, there are some jobs that don’t take long. It takes a few seconds. You can go to the job results page and see what that’s there, but you can also just see the results pop up. So you can see the job results immediately. And instantly see what is available to you, and again, just make things simpler and quicker and easier. On the things on the bottom, there’s, again, a ton of stuff that’s been added.

Page lazy loading, that is something to avoid, a blank page appearing on the screen if there’s a lot of data that needs to load. It’s now a lazy load. There’ll be a page immediately, and then lazy, kind of, you know, over time, loaded information. It’s a much better experience there. With custom field scoping, if you’re taking advantage of the custom field features in Nautobot, talked with a customer on this yesterday, they may have a ton of custom fields.

Previously, they were used for every single device type in the entire system. Now you can scope it down, and you can say, I only want these fields for, say, Manufacturer Cisco, these fields for Manufacturer Arista. And you can absolutely scope that down, so that’s a… that’s a big improvement there. Bulk renaming, again, making it simpler and easier to just change a bunch of things at once.

And then finally, with job console logging, really just… as we are giving information with jobs, and so much of what can be done within Nautobot is done with jobs, how can we improve the information that gets back to users and provide something easier and quicker and simpler to be able to see the console logs from within jobs themselves? All right But there’s more than just what’s in core, so there are also applications. There’s a couple of applications we’ll talk about in more detail.

This first one… well, the first one was just really talking about what is the pain points that people have with upgrading operating systems. I’m sure there are some users who have never upgraded their operating systems. that’s kind of frightening, but there’s probably people out there who have done that, but everyone has to go through this. They have to update systems, and it’s especially an issue when they have to do it at scale. So in the examples kind of listed here, there’s a bunch of things that have to go on.

You have to do it with… for a large number of devices, you have to break it down with a… team dedicated to doing that. They can’t do it all in one go. They have to do it really over a series of months. It takes a bunch of hours. There’s steps to do for every one of them. The goal for us was to say with OS upgrades, as we’ll see, is to… how can we automate that? How can we simplify that? How can we look to reduce the manpower, the hours that are required in order to do these things at scale?

So, the answer is OS upgrades. That is a new application as part of 3.1, and an important thing to note as kind of the steps, these are the same steps we listed in the last slide, as users go through these steps, and they do the quality assurance beforehand, they stage the image, they install the image, they do the quality assurance afterwards, all that needs to be done.

And everything needs to be done in order to ensure that A the image is there and upgraded and working, but B, that when you say it’s working, it’s not just that the device reports, hey, I’ve been upgraded, but that there haven’t been any significant changes in that device, and what that means can vary. It can mean that maybe there’s, you know, the routes have stayed roughly the same. Maybe it means that you still have connectivity, whatever, you know, whatever thing you have to do.

You should be able to do those checks both before and after. I’m talking about OS upgrades as an application, but actually, we have another application that’s called Operational Compliance. That is a standalone thing, I’ll talk about what it can do as a standalone functionality in just a little bit, but in conjunction with OS upgrades, it is even more powerful, because one of the things you can do is do that quality assurance check, check for operational commands, show commands on the device.

And determine what… whether the… the actions you’re running, in this example, an OS upgrade, has been successful, and it is truly working. So all this is kind of integrated together. You have a complete automated end-to-end solution that allows you to upgrade devices, and as we kind of alluded to on the last slide, doing it at scale.

Because, you know, again, from a Nautobot perspective, what we’re always doing is thinking about that customers are utilizing this at scale with, you know, a large number of devices, a large number of objects. That’s always at the forefront, and so it really, you know, comes through when you’re doing it there. If you’re upgrading one device, that’s simpler, but if you’re doing thousands at a time, then this kind of requires that. All right.

Brian, why don’t we kick it over to Chris and let Chris, start the upgrade, demo, that way it can run in the background when we cover some of the other slides.

Excellent idea.

Hello, everyone. So the first thing we’re going to take a look at here is the device page for the device that we’re upgrading. In this case, WiiOS 01. And what I want to point out before we start is the software version that’s being tracked down here. We’re, currently on SE4, and we’re going to upgrade it to SE10. So let’s go about starting that process. We’re gonna go to Operations, and then Upgrade Devices. And we’ll fill out a few fields in here.

Starting with the platform field, and this will automatically filter our devices field. In our lab environment, we just have the one iOS device, so we’ll select that. And then we’ll select the version of software that we want to migrate to, which is SE10. And we’ll select the image file. We’re also going to want to name these snapshots, so we’ll name it webinar pre snapshot. and webinar. Oops. Slam shut the wall. Now, here we’ll select the validation rules or checks that we wanted to go through.

In this case, I’ve grouped them together in an OS Upgrades check. And we’ll go ahead and kick off this process. And if you look along the top here. as the software walks through the upgrade process, you’ll know exactly where you’re at every step of the way. So the pre-check just grabbed a snapshot, and now it’s begun uploading the image. And with that, I’ll go ahead and pass it back to Jeff while we wait for this to complete.

And one quick thing, if you could keep it there for a second, Chris. Sure. One of the things is just to hammer home again from a user experience perspective, what we’re doing here is giving more information within the job results page, and that’s this little A bit up top, where you can kind of see the things getting checked off. The purpose of that is to say. you know, if you want to see exactly where you are, you’re able to do so. We’re trying to see in every single area where you can add more and more user experience to improve that there, and make it more obvious what steps are being executed at any given time. That was my only little side bit there.

Alright, let me go ahead and share the deck again.

Sure.

Hey, Brian, I’m just gonna give you and the product team a little bit of recognition here. Again, that integrated visual cue showing the process across the top. The fact that we’ve got the applications working together, we’ve got operational compliance working with OS upgrades is indicative of where Nautobot’s going, and how the development team is thinking about how users are really going to use this in the field.

Give the users more information, give them more tools. in their toolbox, and make those tools work together so you can actually stitch them together the way real use cases would require them to be. So, Brian, great job to you and your team for making that, a reality in the 3-1, the 3-1 release.

Thank you. I will Venmo you, your, your… you know, your payment for giving me that in the webinar, I appreciate that. So what we’re now showing is saying, alright, if we are doing this exactly what I kind of talked about earlier, the functionality to look to improve what is going on here, and improve in certain dimensions, different dimensions. One is with a team allocation. If one person can run it, I mean, okay, Chris is showing against one device, but you can run against a large number of devices at once.

So that is going to lower the number of users that are required to do it. By the same token, you actually now can do it in a much narrower window. It still may take a bunch of nights if you’re looking to do it, you know, for a number of devices. You probably want to break it down into a number of nights, but you’re no longer doing it across multiple months. And that overall means, you know, time, it means headcount reduction in doing the functionality, which ends in cost reduction. So that’s the main focus of doing this, is to ensure, just like everything, we can do this at scale, with this.

Hey, Brian, before you go on to the next slide, we’ve got a couple of questions in the Q&A already. I’ll go ahead and set them up for you, just because we’re on the slide and we’re talking about it. First question is, are those versions linked to the Lifecycle plugin and reporting back from the device? So when you upgrade a device, will lifecycle management automatically capture that you’ve changed the OS on the device.

I honestly am not sure. I believe the answer is yes, but I actually didn’t test that. I will say this, I’m gonna take a note. If the answer isn’t yes in 3.1.0, it will be yes pretty soon after that, because the answer should be yes. But I honestly am unsure with that. I, I… when I tested this, I forgot to look at lifecycle after it, I’ll be honest, and so I don’t know. But if it isn’t, we will make it so, I’ll put it that way.

Let me… let me ask our demo guide here. Chris, any chance that you looked at that? Do you know, does OS upgrades, when it runs, automatically update device lifecycle management?

I didn’t happen to look at that, but I imagine that if it updates it on the device page, that’s going to be carried over to device.

That’s what…

Cool.

I’m, like, 83% sure the answer is yes, but I… I can’t… I can’t swear to it.

Alright, well, I stumped you, I stumped you with the first one.

Yeah, so we’re 0 for 1, that’s cool, yeah, keep the company.

that question, we will absolutely come back and provide a definitive answer via email at the end of this, just to get that person the right answer. But as you heard Brian commit, if the answer isn’t yes today, it’ll be yes in the next couple of weeks when we get the next.

I didn’t say a couple of weeks. To be clear, for the former record, I said soon, right?

Soon. Soon.

Right, but no, we will absolutely make sure. I mean, again, I’m pretty sure the answer is yes, but we will check.

Alright, next one that kind of goes along with this question was, can you run multiple OS upgrade jobs at once, or can you run groups across multiple locations?

Yes.

See, the second answer?

That one I know. That one I’ve… that one I’ve tested.

Alright, we’re gonna let you keep going then, there’s more questions coming in, we’ll start to manage those in the queue, but Brian, please keep going.

Absolutely. All right, we’ll move on to the next slide, thank you. So… this is related to what we’re just talking about, and I’ll kind of bring it in together as we move on with these slides, but when we are talking about, Failures that can occur with configuration in general. And what does that mean, and how can you verify? This is an example to say if someone is doing an ACL change request.

It… they may want to do additional checks and additional, what we would, again, call operational compliance to ensure that you are complying with any kind of, of, changes, correctly within the network. So here, if you haven’t done any testing, there can be something… in this example, it’s an ACL. If the dependencies are wrong in the ACL, and you insert it in the wrong area, and you don’t test it out, there can be then traffic drops down the line. Alright. So, what are we actually doing?

This is an example of how operational compliance, the application there, can then work to ensure it’s doing it. So, first off, the building blocks. And some of these you actually saw, Chris, when he was demoing it, what the building blocks are there, because again, remember. Operation Compliance can run on its own, but it can also run in conjunction with OS upgrades.

So in this example, or sorry, in this, what we’re doing when we set this up, there’s kind of a few components and a few groupings, you could say, that we have here. The first is you have to set up what’s there for operational compliance. That is the parsers, what… how do you parse the data that’s coming off? What are the actual commands you use? That are the show commands on the given devices.

You can then do rules, sorry, rules based upon that, which we call validation rules, to determine, how… what are… actually validate what the commands coming back, what the information coming back from the system is. You can also then group them together, which is the validation groups. You can have a bunch of them there. We actually saw this earlier when, it was called Upgrade All OS. I forget, honestly, what it was. But there was that group he picked that went to ensure that he ran a bunch of tests at one go.

That’s the validation group. The collection is then that snapshot. That was where you’re showing the pre and post. You can do a pre and post snapshot in the example of OS upgrades, but you can always get snapshots. In this example at the bottom, which again is working with the ACL change request, you can define everything. take your snapshot, do your change, which is kind of the ACL change, then do another snapshot, and then finally is the comparison.

How do you determine what have been… what have the changes been between these things? In your definition, you can define a whole slew of… of… comparison. So they can be something as simple as exact match. I need this actual string to be there, and it needs to be the same in both places. You can do things that are much more advanced, you can do it with a regex.

You can do a threshold value, so for example, in route, the number of routes, if you do, and I’ve done this before with this system, if you gather the number of BGP routes before an OS upgrade, and it is 10,000, or whatever the number is. If it’s 9,807 afterwards, that’s probably fine. 9,914, it’s probably just some churn, some routes have dropped. If you have 8 routes after you’ve done the upgrade, something has gone really wrong. So you can set a threshold and say how much is there.

There’s a ton of things you can do there. But again, the way is, and the point is, you can automate this quality assurance. and ensure that the changes that are being made, whether they’re config changes, like the ACL change here, or their OS upgrade changes, can be done. And, and verified. Alright.

So this is… is just… there’s… there’s a slew of things that can be done, again, whether it’s OS upgrades, whether it’s config changes, you can just use snapshots just on their own if you want, and not kind of have any before and after. Just have a golden snapshot where you can say, this is my baseline, for a given, series of, Of show commands on the system. All of that is available within operational compliance.

Hey, Brian, got another really interesting question for you on operational compliance. I just want to, since we’re on the slide and we’re talking about it, I want to throw it out there to you. For the command parser for Operational Compliance app, any chance we’ve incorporated the same ETL capabilities we have with the command mapper for the device onboarding app? Meaning. Can we specify the parser, NTC templates, pyats, etc? Can we specify… The JM… The JMES path expression?

James, yeah, the JMESPath, yes, the answer is…

Can we provide Jinja 2 templates for further processing or transformation?

Yes, so there’s… there’s a series of things that are, that are there within it. There’s, and I actually don’t have this part memorized, but there was JMESPath, there was… a series of commands to have. This is based upon the same infrastructure that was already there. So all of that is available, and you can do a full regex if you want as well within it as the information comes in. So there’s a lot of control at the command parser level, and then it’s extended out at the validation rule level. To be able to, again, gather more detailed information from us.

Great, thanks.

Sure. Insights. So, switching gears a little, we talked about OS upgrades, talked about compliance. What else have we added into it? One of them is Nautobot Insights. So, the idea is to have, dashboards that are… have information available at your fingertips.

There’s a series of things That we’ve done, we’ve kind of listed some on the left, they range from the you know, just my device data, what’s my inventory information, what’s my device information, my lifecycle information, golden config information, which is the one that’s kind of shown on the right there. A ton of stuff, Nautobot jobs. So we’ve added a bunch of these in already.

The thinking behind this, again, going back to the top thematic improvement we’re looking to do is improve user experience. is to make the data we have, and there’s a ton of data in a customer’s given Nautobot, want to make it easier and simpler to gather that data and display it on screen. I had talked with a customer earlier this week, and they said they were able to… they were very happy, they were able to give their management an answer on, you know, some detailed information.

They just quickly ran a job… created a job and did it, and I said, that’s fantastic. And in 3.1, you literally go to a page, and it’s already there, and it’s already pretty in a chart, and you can already see it automatically. So, really trying to make things pop And make things nice for customers to be able to view and see the data instantaneously as they would like, regardless of the type of information in the system. These are some of the dashboards kind of shown here. The example given here was devices.

That’s what’s called a donut chart, in case you’re wondering. It’s got a hole in the middle. But basically kind of a pie chart there that shows it. We’ve summarized the number of devices, broken down by type. So there’s a whole series of things kind of listed on the left. That we’ve, we’ve already added into Nautobot in 3.1. If you recall earlier, I talked about the building up, and that’s a standard thing. Cloud also includes more stuff, because it includes information on the cloud deployment itself.

So that’s not necessarily Nautobot, information on what is inside Nautobot, but what is inside… what is the makeup of the cloud deployment. So again, trying to provide more and more information to give people information at their fingertips within the system. Alright, So, one of the… I mean, it says it pretty straightforward up there. You can’t automate things you don’t know about. Nautobot has had device onboarding for quite some time. All of that is still there. You can absolutely onboard devices.

But one of the things here, and kind of shown in this example, if you want to update, you’re trying to update all your firewalls. If there’s an unknown firewall you don’t know about, you don’t have inside Nautobot, you’re obviously not going to be able to automate it, you don’t know it’s there in the first place. So, how do you get that information in? Is the, is the question that is answered by this. Oh, I’m sorry, this was talking about… yes, I forgot, there was a Ringwraith.

This is technically supposed to be a hacker, but I keep thinking it’s a Lord of the Rings character. If it’s not there, you’re not… it’s not that you’re not updating it, it’s that bad people can attack it. That’s obviously bad. You can tell he’s bad because he’s a hooded black figure. Chris told me earlier that all hackers look this way. He actually said that in one of our meetings. But it is, in all seriousness, it is crucial.

You have to know what’s there, you have to be able to have an accurate, You know, list and determination of everything in the network. And… We’re looking to make that easier and simpler to get into Nautobot itself. So, we’re doing that with device discovery. One important thing to talk about, and it talks about it on the bottom left there, is this doesn’t replace device onboarding. This works in conjunction with device onboarding. Much like we’d said, OS upgrades and operational compliance work together.

Device discovery and device onboarding work together. Device onboarding does much more advanced stuff and gets a ton of data in. But device discovery is the ability to go out and discover, scan the network, discover what’s there. You can do that with what’s called a discovery profile, listed on the left. Determine what your prefixes are, what’s excluded, how many IPs you want to scan, all this stuff that’s there.

It supports SNMP, it supports SSH. goes out, brings those in, and from there, you can then see, A, are those things already in Nautobot, or B, are there… should I do something about that? And they can be devices that are partially there already, there can be some conflicts. They can just be missing, and in that case, you can then onboard those devices by just simply selecting them and saying, I want to onboard these things, and then it goes into the more detailed device onboarding.

So, the ability to scan and discover the network built into the system now. Tools. So, two points here. One is, you know, again, trying to make things simpler. When we talk about user experience, some of it is pretty charts, like we talked about with Nautobot Insights, or the OS upgrade, seeing everything, click off. Some of them are just making your day-to-day things easier. So, one of the bits, what, you know, we’ve called, I’ve talked before about, with customers as mean time to innocence.

Whose fault is it that we can’t get to a device? What’s going on with that device? Is it reachable? So we put in a series of tools within the system, listed there on the left. You can ping, you can do a DNS lookup, you can do a traceroute, etc. All of that is available, from within Nautobot itself, and go out to the device. And then, you know, going back on the right there, this is kind of showing the results for it. once you run the job, we want to be able to instantly run that job from there.

You can also go to the jobs page and run it manually, but you can just do it automatically here. You can instantly see results, so it’s at your fingertips, you don’t have to kind of browse away and come back, you can see the results immediately. So all these network tools are also part of Nautobot 3.1. From a cloud perspective, there is, additional functionality that we’ve called, Cloud Secure Proxy. What this is, is a way to simplify connectivity between Nautobot Cloud and the devices that you have on-prem.

So, before, of course, we’ve always been able to talk with Nautobot Cloud to devices on-prem, but in each case, what we were doing is we were connecting, Nautobot Cloud into those devices, and there may be a bunch of connections that are going down into your corporate network. Proxy… the Secure Proxy A proxies that communication, allows you to just have a single component that sits in your environment, kind of shown there on the right there. Could be one in your data center, could be one on your corporate campus.

And then that has a secure connection. It calls home into Nautobot Cloud, has a secure connection. Once that’s established, you have a full connection back and forth to those devices. Another advantage of this, and kind of alluded to with the repeated 172116 there, is… We’re now completely fine with Nautobot Cloud with overlapping IPs. So, A, you have the simplified, there’s one hole being punched in the firewall, because there’s one connection back for N devices, whatever number that might be.

And also, too, if there are devices with the exact same IP, we had a customer who was doing acquisitions, they have, you know, I don’t know, some 192.168 or whatever, they have devices that are exactly the same with different branches, different environments. That’s fine now, because now Nautobot, who actually, Nautobot proper doesn’t know, it just thinks it’s talking to the device.

Technically, what’s happening is, it’s going through that proxy, it’s communicating out to that device, we can now correctly handle 2, 3, N overlapping IPs, because we know that they are on different networks, and they’re utilizing different secure proxies. So we do feel this will really extend and improve our Nautobot Cloud offerings, again, to make it easier and simpler to bring devices into the system and under management. But, yeah, there’s still more. So, I swear I’m gonna be done at some point.

But, the MCP servers. So, we added, NautobotGPT in May of last year, which is our first part of our AI solutions. What we’ve done now, is add an MCP server. So, there are some customers who, either can’t use NautobotGPT because it was a hosted solution, or they can’t use the backend inference engine that we had had. If they want to, NautobotGPT hasn’t gone anywhere, that’s still perfect, we’ll talk about some improvements there as well.

But we had plenty of customers who said, look, I need to be able to communicate And as kind of listed here on the right, technically they’re talking to the GraphQL, the REST API of Nautobot itself. They can now use an MCP server, use their own backend inference engine, and still take advantage of our AI solution. So that has also been added at this time into the 3.1 release. I said there were more stuff coming for NautobotGPT. This is an improvement to NautobotGPT itself.

This is different from what I talked about before. Again, the previous MCP server was in… doing something in lieu of NautobotGPT. What this is doing is saying, I want an MCP server for NautobotGPT, And why you do that is primarily to communicate with your IDE.

So if someone has VS Code, or if someone has some of the other things kind of listed down at the bottom, you can now, instead of querying NautobotGPT solely through the web console, which is still there, you can still do it, but you can now do it directly through your IDE, If you’re creating jobs, this is huge, because you usually want to be creating jobs in your IDE.

If you want to say, I need to take advantage of this, I want to use Claude Code, I want to use some other functionality listed there, the Gemini Assistant, etc. you can take advantage of this inside your IDE and still communicate back with NautobotGPT itself. Alright, so, there was a lot in 3-1. There’s a lot that’s there. There is still more coming in 3-2, and we’re locking this down. to, talk about some of the stuff that we have in 3.2.

First off, from a Nautobot Cloud perspective on the left, we’re looking to really improve the self-service capabilities in Nautobot Cloud. So, again, dovetailing with improving user experience, you can, of course, customize Nautobot, and you can, of course, customize your Nautobot inside Nautobot Cloud. Right now, it requires a little bit of communication back with our team, because it’s not something you can do as a customer yourself. We’re extending that.

Users will be able to extend their Nautobot, extend jobs, add applications, do all these things, bring up wheel files themselves within Nautobot Cloud, so really improve the functionality of Nautobot Cloud, and make it easier to get additional code and additional systems there. On the other side, from a Nautobot perspective, there’s a lot more coming from UX and UI. So there’s some stuff coming from, Nautobot Core.

There are additional things, that we’re looking to simplify getting data out of Nautobot, and making it easier and simpler to have that there. So we’ll stay tuned, I’ll say. We’ll be announcing some of this stuff over the coming months as we build towards the 3.2 release, which will be over the summer.

Alright, Brian, let’s go ahead and pick up with Chris, get back into the demos, and let’s see where that OS upgrade demo got us.

All right.

Alright, let’s take a look. So it looks like it’s completed the walking through the steps of the upgrade. Before we go into the details of that, I’d just like to take a few minutes to describe how some of the functionality works within OS upgrades and operational compliance. The first thing we’re going to take a look at here is Is the validation rules. Just open that up real quick. And here you’ll see a list of checks that we can do before and after a change.

In this particular change, we checked the ARP table, so we want it to remain consistent. And we also checked the interface status, which, again, we wanted to remain consistent pre- and post-upgrade. So let’s just take a peek in our table real quick. And one of the things I want us to pay attention to is the rule type. There’s about 5 or 6 different rule types. This one is an exact match, so it’s looking for the same thing. And in command parsers, you can see that they’re different for each platform.

In this particular case, since we’re upgrading an iOS device, we’re using the iOS command and a custom parser for that. And if we go back to the other one, it’s a very similar story, exact match, and then each platform has a unique way of processing the validation rule. Now, validation rules can be grouped, and this is useful if you have similar checks taking place for similar changes. So, in this case, I grouped them under OS upgrade checks.

And as you can see here, we have the two checks that I mentioned a few moments ago. The next thing I’d like to take a look at is the pre and post snapshots, so let’s open that up. And, we have the pre-snapshot here, and the post snapshot here. If we open one of those… We can see that in the pre-check, the interface status, along with… so the… The administrative status and the operational status is captured along with the interface name and IP address.

And very similarly, for the ARP table, we were able to capture that as well. Now, these snapshots are compared as part of the upgrade process, so let’s go ahead and take a look at that. And if we look here, the interface status was successful, and there’s no dip. The ARP table was unsuccessful. That doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s a bad thing.

Sometimes the ARP table takes a few moments to populate, and in this case, it looks like it was missing one entry here, for an adjacency, but I’m sure if we check that now, that would be correct. Let’s go to the job page, and as you can see, we collected the first snapshot, uploaded the image, saved the configuration, performed the install operation. Again, captured the post state of the device. Compared the two snapshots, and then assigned the new software on the device page.

So let’s go back to this device page, and when we first looked at this, it was running SE4. Let’s go ahead and confirm that that updated. With a page refresh. And sure enough, that has been populated to SE10. The next thing I’d like to show is is our device discovery. So let’s go ahead and do that now. So… If we come over to here… And we’ll go to Discovery Profiles. This is where you define where the application should look for new devices. In this particular case, we’re looking at these two slash 32 prefixes.

We could also exclude prefixes here as well, so maybe we have a section of a prefix that is dedicated towards something specific, and we don’t want to discover in that portion of the prefix. We won’t search there. And we also set the protocol here. Lastly, there’s the secret groups group that is used to log into the device. So now that we know how the… discovery, works. We’re gonna go ahead and kick it off and see it in action. We’re gonna go to Run Device Discovery. We’re gonna select a profile.

Which will be the NYC Lab. And we’ll go ahead and kick that off. Now, this takes about 15 seconds to run, and what it’s going… what it’s doing in the background is going to those subnets and trying to connect to the IP addresses that are within scope. And that should be done here in a moment. Alright, looks like that’s finished.

And just… just quick there? Okay, well, close. But that was the quick job result, so just being able to kind of see the… the results as it there. Okay, that result wasn’t so exciting, just said done. But if there’s more information, that would kind of prove there into that, into that modal window. Sorry, Chris.

Oh, no problem at all. So let’s go ahead and refresh this page and see if those two devices are now on there. We can see NYC Leaf 1 and 2, and now that we have it populated on this page, we could then forward it over to our device onboarding application, just by checking these boxes. Clicking Device Onboarding. and filling out some basic information about the device. So, in this case, we’ll put in the NYC location. Network to code. Set a device role, and optionally set a tenant, and then click onboard devices, and now in the background it’s going out, connecting to those devices, and getting them into Nautobot. So, with that said, I’ll go ahead and pass it back to Jeff and Brian.

Awesome, Chris, thank you so very much for running those demos for us and showcasing, sort of, what’s going on and what’s new in Nautobot 3.1. Again, I think actually seeing those things run live really sort of bring them to life and give a sense of how we’ve really worked to make the applications more valuable, have them provide more functionality at an easier level of use, and integrate them. So device onboarding is now work… or device discovery is now working with device onboarding.

OS upgrades, working with operational compliance. This is all thanks to Brian and his team really trying to lower the bar for people to kind of get in and use and get value out of Nautobot easier and faster, and also making it a more sort of enriched user experience, so I think fantastic there. And with that, Brian, I know you’ve been chomping at the bit, some of these great questions out in the Q&A. Go ahead and pick your favorite one, and let’s dive in on these.

Okay, alright, alright, let’s see, there’s a bunch, right, to be clear. Really good question. So, one of the questions, via MCP servers, you’re exposing tools covering all your API endpoints, or are there some limitations? For example, only forget endpoints, read only. Can an AI agent have access to potentially disruptive actions? So, it is going into the, API components of Nautobot itself. It kind of depends on how you’ve set it up.

The answer, as far as it’s disruptive, if you would like to have, You know, if you… if you want to have disruptive things, you really can’t, because what it is doing is gathering information from the system, so they’re informational endpoints. With the APIs themselves, so… basically all of the querying, all of the gets, to your point, that you’re able to do it. It is not so much an execute.

If you want to do executing with agents, we are building out additional agents into the system, and those will allow, you know, some actual post commands to it, but for the MCP server, those are get, endpoints themselves.

Thanks for that, Brian. Hey, I’ll just make a quick note for the folks on the webinar. If you look in the chat section, you’ll see that Kristee’s added out there several links to some material on 3.1 and the various Nautobot editions. We want to get that out to you early, so you had a chance to click on those links or copy them someplace where you could use them.

You know, they’ll be up live for the rest of the webinar, so please copy them, use them, download them at your convenience, but just wanted to let you know they were out there so you didn’t get to the end of the webinar and suddenly think, oh, I wanted to click on that, or I wanted to save that. It’s out there for you to grab right now. We’ll remind you of that at the end of the webinar as well. Brian, do you have another favorite question you want to answer?

I… favorite is… I don’t want to… I don’t want to play favorites, but they’re very good questions I will kind of talk to. One of the questions was, was both the OS upgrades and operating compliance apps are commercial offerings? That is correct. Those… those are commercial offerings that were specifically part of the, enterprise, platform. Continuing on OS upgrades, there’s a question on how does it work with other workflows when the image file transfer and upgrade are a single command.

The answer is we’re adding in more and more functionality to give more and more control over that. There is additional jobs that we’re allowing to run, and as we enhance it over the next few months, we’ll actually even give more control where multiple jobs can be run. We first allow one job to be able to be run before and after, so you can stage it that way. We’re actually extending that out to have a series of jobs. That you can then run, with it, with it themselves.

On the… there’s a question of, does the OS upgrade produce a comparison between pre- and post-upgrade commands? Specifically, is there a JSON-based comparison available, so we can easily identify if any routes are missing? The answer is yes, it’s technically done from operational compliance, but again, they work together. But absolutely, you can see the comparison, you can see the diff. and determine if there are any differences.

It actually, within it, will show the pre and post, basically the before and after, and it will trigger based on how you’ve set up the validation rule. Again, it can be on a tolerance basis, or an exact match, or a series of other things. But you can also see what the actual results are, and be able to, to view that there. For the comparison section on operational compliance, is it making use of the JDIF library so we have the capability of doing tolerance-based comparison? Yes, it is.

So that is, that is available there, as part of the, of the system. The professional support for the on-prem option will still allow us to create custom plugins, absolutely. You know, one of the things we’re, we’re, you know, ensuring we don’t lose sight of is the advantage that Nautobot has, is it is insanely customizable. None of that is going away. There will always be jobs, there will always be applications you’ll be able to create, you can always write your own. Absolutely, that’s there.

However you’d like to customize it, that is inherent to the solution, inherent to the system, will continue. What we’re trying to do is, A, make it easier for people to do that in cloud, as you saw with the self-service stuff coming in a future release, number one. And then number two, make sure that folks who maybe don’t want to do that level of customization can also do things quickly and easily.

So we’re trying to make it easier for those users to be able to do it, but absolutely, we’re never going away. from the, full customization and the ability to extend the product. That extensibility is absolutely paramount.

Hey, Brian, let me throw you a bit of a curveball here, because this is one that I really like, and I’m going to reach back to the 3.0 release as well. It’s this question about workflows, love it, so again, shout out to the team, great job. Will the workflow capability be available for Nautobot jobs? And I’m gonna… I’m gonna, I’m gonna throw an extra hook in here. Okay. Knowing that in 3.0, we launched a workflow approval process.

We.

Talk about how workflows in general will be considered and integrated across the platform now and going forward.

Yeah. So, absolutely. And again, this dovetails back to we need to ensure that the components can act off on their own. So right now, as Jeff talked about, in 3.0, we added the approval workflow functionality, where you can have jobs go through an approval workflow. as we extend out jobs workflow, and jobs workflow are, how can I string together a series of jobs. And what can I do with that? There is work we’re doing, it’s not exactly in 3.1. We have to save something for later, to be honest.

There’s two things we’re doing with that. One is a simpler workflow, which is kind of like a CSS, where you say, okay, do thing, you know, do workflow one, or do job one, then two, then three, then four. That, I’d say, stay tuned. That’s coming, sooner than you think. That’ll be out this year. Then the next thing the team is working on is more advanced workflows to be able to say, how do I actually string things together and have logic built in to say, do X, if not do Y, and things like that.

So that is actually in design as we speak. To Jeff’s point, it would absolutely work in conjunction with the approval, because we want to give users as much control as they can. And again, the purpose of the approval Is so, you can have maybe a more junior engineer do something, do a job, but it doesn’t execute immediately. It then goes to a more senior engineer for approval and analysis. So that is… that is also where we’re going to be doing that in conjunction as well. All right, and Jeff is frozen. He asked me a question, and and that, that frozen. So I apologize for that.

So, I’ll go ahead and ask you the next question here, Brian. Can the tools, can those tools use a proxy jump host if needed?

Yeah, so the answer is today, no. That’s something we’re kind of looked to do. It is using, and this is in conjunction with kind of one of the other questions, It is using the infrastructure that is already there, so if it’s, like, Netmiko or Napalm or what have you, it is using that system that is already, defined for it. We don’t give a ton of control to users right now with… how they would proxy communication for it.

That is a thing we can look to add, but it is not there in the current 3.1. it’s using the same infrastructure that Nautobot is, and again, part of that was to say we want to be able to prove Nautobot has connectivity to those devices, but it is something we can look to improve in future releases as well.

Alright, and it looks like we have one last question here. Would we have the option to provide which underlying library to use to perform the SSH test? For example, Netmiko vs. Napalm. The SSH test is good, but I hope it would actually use the underlying libraries that the Nautobot apps use.

Yeah, so that’s kind of what I was alluding to, is that there isn’t the option for the user to choose right now, but we are using the same underlying libraries themselves.

And it looks like we got one last question here at the end. Do we have support for Napalm or LLDP neighbors for Aruba devices, too?

Yeah, that one, I was actually trying to see if I could look that one up, because I don’t remember that one off the top of my head. It is, I don’t know if we have neighbor support for it, I honestly… I will say this, I did go through all of these and kind of look at it, and I created a, you know, a spreadsheet for the team to have internally, but I don’t remember Aruba off the top of my head, and I apologize, I’d have to find that one out.

All right, and we did get one more question. Will the commercial apps ever be offered individually, or only in the three groups?

Yeah, so right now, the answer is there are no plans to have it kind of as an ad hoc solution, and part of that is, again, to simplify things. Again, user experience encompasses a lot, but part of it is skewing and how we deliver the product to customers. And wanted to keep it as simple as we can, and say, okay, with professional, there’s a lot that’s available. With Enterprise, we’ve added more, and then Cloud, of course, added to the dimension. as well. But currently, no. If you’re looking to get OS upgrades, I have good news. It comes with more than just OS upgrades, but it’s not kind of available as a separate ad hoc component as of right now.

All right, excellent. Looks like Jeff’s back, so I’ll go ahead and pass it back to you, Jeff.

Thank you, Chris, and thank you for jumping in there for a moment. I apologize, for some reason, my system decided to take a nap there in the last couple of minutes. If we go to the next slide, just very quickly, we’ll run down, just to highlight again for what we accomplished today. Thank everybody for joining us. was fantastic. We obviously went through the Nautobot 3.1 features, gave you a little sneak peek about where our focus is going to be in Nautobot 3.2.

Gave you the demo, showing both operational compliance and OS upgrades, as well as the device discovery and device onboarding integration. So hopefully those demos really opened your eyes in how easily and how simply these applications are working together and delivering value for you very quickly out of the box. Had a great Q&A. Thank you for everybody who submitted questions.

If we didn’t get a complete answer to you, as Brian pointed out, we will certainly follow up via email and get those answers out to everybody to make sure all of your questions are answered. If you have any additional questions, do not hesitate to either dump them into the Q&A the last minute or so here, or send them directly to us via email.

One last thought I’ll just add here, again, in the chat are a handful of links where you can download information about the 3.1 release, and the spec sheets for Nautobot Professional and Nautobot Enterprise as well. Again, as you get on there, on those pages, there’s contact forms, you can reach out to us with any questions you might have. about network automation in general, specific applications, or any of the editions, if you have a specific question about what you get with each, each edition.

And with that, I just want to say thank you, everybody, thank you for your time, thank you for trusting Network to Code, and thank you for being the best part of the Nautobot community. Have a great day.

Thank you.