I know I’m very late to the party probably everybody has already moved on to Telemetry. But during the Annual Shutdown of Dec ‘24, I had some spare time, so I wanted to set this up in my personal lab and play around. At work, I have been testing Model Driven Telemetry(MDT) on Cisco’s IOS-XR for a while now, so I wanted to share some of my learnings through this post. I will be primarily focusing on Cisco IOS-XR’s implementation of MDT, more precisely GRPC DIAL-OUT in this post.

At the end of my previous blog post I mentioned about wanting to work on Textual, and I’m excited to share here my first project using Textual. I feel like for us network engineers, working on a CLI makes our work more enjoyable so naturally, building a TUI(Terminal User Interface) to do some of the automation tasks was a no-brainer to me. I have called it Net-TUI, a TUI application to do few network automation tasks.

In this blog post I will be going through how I went about building a Network Dashboard using couple of my favorite Python libraries, Nornir and Rich. I’m quite sure that if you have been exploring the network automation world, you would have come across Nornir already. And similarly there is a very good chance that you have also come across Rich, which is in my opinion one of the coolest libraries out there! If you are someone who loves working in CLI, like I do, you will absolutely love Rich!

In this blog post I’ll be going through a Test Scenario which involves multiple Test Cases with some interesting checks. I will be covering only the new things I’ve added for this Test Scenario when compared to my earlier posts, which can be found here. Test Suite begins by validating the network status on a particular device, this involves checking protocols such as OSPF, BGP, Interface Status etc. After ensuring network is in steady state, a configuration change is executed and after the change, network is validated again to ensure there has been no network impact.

It’s been a while since my first blog post as I mentioned there, I’m at a new job (well it’s been 2 months, so ’newish’) and I’ve been busy getting to know the job(as with any job, there is a LOT to learn!).

Learning Robot Framework (RF) has been one of my objectives in these first few months as that is entirely new for me. As I continue to learn and explore RF, I wanted to take some time out to share few things I have learnt. When it comes to network testing, it’s not always about testing features, protocols, it also involves testing the hardware components. In this blog post, I want to discuss one such test scenario. This particular Test scenario would be to restart a FPC numerous times and to check and ensure it comes back up to Online state. This is what we call a Negative Trigger Event Testing. Now imagine having to do this manually, needless to say it’s a time consuming task, this is where RF comes into play.

In my new job role as a Test Engineer, knowing how to use Robot Framework for Automating Test Cases is crucial, to save time and to make testing more fun! As I’m going through this learning journey, I wanted to blog about it for anyone who is looking to start this journey and also to help me understand things in a better way.

There are plenty of good resources out there which explains the Robot Framework and it’s components. Best place to start would be the Robot Framework Documentation, which shows some interactive examples and very clear explaination. During my learning what I have come to realise is, there are lot of resources around Robot Framework used for Application Testing but there are not a lot of resources focused on Network Testing(or maybe I haven’t been thorough with my search!). That’s also one of the reaons for starting this blog, to give a Network Engineer’s perspective on Robot Framework and use the examples around networking to help us understand this better.