Automating Network Deployment with Cisco DNA Center and Cisco Action Orchestrator

The Story:

A major retailer is standing up a new location. They require:

◉ A connection to corporate remote data center for price list
◉ To quickly deploy the local network at the branch including standardized configuration
◉ On site compute for localized advertisement, webservers and general compute.

Multi Domain Story

Check out Matt’s Blog to learn more about the overall story and what we’ve done.

What I would like to focus on is how we’ve Integrated Cisco DNA Center to automate the standing up of a new network with Cisco Action Orchestrator (CAO)

The Tech:

Cisco DNA Center

I had two tasks to accomplish:

1. Discover and provision the network in the new branch

2. Create and deploy an SSID throughout the entire store

The way Network Discovery works in Cisco DNA Center, first I have to initiate a Discovery Task based on a range of IP addresses.

Once the task is completed and the device is part of the managed devices. I can dynamically create my sites and assign the devices to each site with the appropriate template.

The Workflow is pretty simple

◉ Authenticate against DNA-Center to get a Token

◉ Grab credentials IDs that are configured in DNAC to access the devices

◉ Initiate Network Discovery

◉ Check if the task is complete

◉ Get a list of discovered devices

Network Discovery workflow built in Cisco Action Orchestrator

To Initiate Network Discovery you need to POST a request to the /dna/intent/api/v1/discovery endpoint with this body

Network Discovery request JSON Body

We are using an IP Range to discover our devices. We are also telling DNAC to access the devices via SSH using the configured credentials.

Once the discovery task is completed. We can check to see the results via /dna/intent/api/v1/discovery endpoint. This endpoint will return the list of all discover devices.

Network Discovery result

Part Deux of this automation journey is to create a standardized SSID. There is a nice API for that which made the workflow pretty simple:

◉ Authenticate against DNA-Center to get an API Token

◉ POST JSON body with SSID configuration to /dna/intent/api/v1/enterprise-ssid

and voila.

CAO Workflow using Enterprise SSID Intent API

The End

Remember how I said earlier this was part of an all star team that has essentially automated the entire story you’ve read? Well what’s great about working with Cisco Action Orchestrator (CAO) is that it didn’t matter the way I’ve built my workflow. When it came time to integrate all of our work, CAO made it very simple and hence we were able to take a small bit of automation for a specific Cisco Product and integrate it into a larger multi domain effort.