Managing device adapters

TrueSight Network Automation ships with built-in device adapters for a large number of vendors and models. If you want to support other devices or other operations on devices in your enterprise, you can create additional adapters.

The goal of the device adapter management module is to manage the following supported entities:

• Vendors: A vendor defines an equipment manufacturer, used for organizing device types.
• Device Types: A device type defines how to interact with one flavor or model of equipment, including how to obtain and modify its configuration or settings.
• Configuration Trails: A configuration trail defines one collection or group of configuration settings that can be obtained from a device, where the system will maintain a change history over time.
• Custom Actions: A custom action defines commands to be run on a device that perform a non-standard operation (that is, an operation beyond the standard span actions shipped with the system, such as snapshot, deploy to active, reboot, etc).
• External Script Actions: An external script action defines a program or script that can be executed by a job that performs some sort of highly site-specific customized manipulations.

These entities are referred to as adapters. You can manage them from the Network Automation user interface without restarting the Network Automation application server. This capability ensures higher server availability. For information about creating custom action adapters, see Developing-a-custom-action-adapter.

Device adapter states

Device adapters are in one of the following states:

• New
• Baseline
• Modified

The following rules govern the state of adapters:

When you have modified a baseline device adapter, you can view a report showing the differences by clicking the View Difference Details icon  against the adapter.

Access rights to newly imported actions

When you add a new custom action or external script action, Network Automation ensures that you are able to execute the new action. If you possess full network rights, then you already have access to all actions. However, if you have lesser rights, Network Automation creates a new role, grants access to the new action in each accessible realm, and associates you with the role. If your XML file contains multiple actions, one role is created per action.

The new role is named Access Only Action followed by the action name. For example, for a newly imported action named Show Highlights, the automatically generated role name is Access Only Action: Show Highlights. An event is logged to track the role creation activity.

Since you are importing a new adapter, it is considered to be in a test phase, during which you develop some code, import it, try it out, update the code, re-import, and repeat the cycle as needed until the code is complete. Thus, only you are granted the right to execute the action, and other users are not able to interfere with your work. Once your testing is done, you should incorporate action access rights into your main set of roles and into your group ACLs, and delete the Access Only Action role. Or, you may choose to retain the role and associate other users with it.

Effects of disabling device adapters

Disabling an adapter makes it unavailable to users. Disabled adapters do not appear in user selection controls in the user interface. You may choose to disable vendors and device types for the equipment you do not own, to reduce the size of frequently presented menus. You might choose to disable custom actions that are not appropriate to your site, to prevent users from running them.

The following table explains the details of disabling various types of adapters:

Where to go from here

Use the topics listed in the following table to import, export, and perform various operations on device adapters.