ChatOps : For Infra Engineers ( with sample Ansible Playbook)

Background

# Ansible: HealthCheck with Cisco WebEx BoT Integration #

Imagine a situation wherein you need periodic output of a command ( running on your servers or network equipment), what do you do presently, login to the device and get it periodically or as and when needed, or run a script and check the outputs, what if the same output was delivered to you on your enterprise messaging platform. For this example, I will be using Cisco WebEx Teams and Ansible.

The high-level architecture is below and quite self-explanatory.

What is a ChatBot?

It is a software that conducts a conversation via over texts like a human being, it simulates a human interaction. For more information about WebEx Team ChatBot: –

https://developer.webex.com/docs/bots

I am also training the chatbot to answer Level 1 Network Queries, using Dialogflow.

I am using Paramiko to connect to the devices and Cisco_Spark Module of Ansible to send the outputs to a Cisco WebEx Chat Room.

All playbooks have been uploaded below: –

https://github.com/mayanknauni/Ansible_HealthCheck_BoT

In future use cases, I would ask ChatBot for ad-hoc reports and it will trigger relevant jobs at the backend and deliver the results to the room.