nautobot-circuit-maintenance 0.1.4

Nautobot plugin to automatically handle Circuit Maintenances Notifications

Nautobot Circuit Maintenance plugin

A plugin for Nautobot to easily handle Circuit Maintenances related to Nautobot Circuits.

nautobot-circuit-maintenance lets you handle maintenances for your Circuits based on notifications received by email by leveraging on circuit-maintenance-parser, a notifications parser library for multiple network service providers that exposes structured data following a recommendation defined in this draft NANOG BCOP.

Installation

The plugin is available as a Python package in pypi and can be installed with pip

pip install nautobot-circuit-maintenance

The plugin is compatible with Nautobot 1.0.0b4 and higher

To ensure Circuit Maintenance is automatically re-installed during future upgrades, create a file named local_requirements.txt (if not already existing) in the Nautobot root directory (alongside requirements.txt) and list the nautobot-circuit-maintenance package:

# echo nautobot-circuit-maintenance >> local_requirements.txt

Once installed, the plugin needs to be enabled in your configuration.py.

# In your configuration.py
PLUGINS = ["nautobot_circuit_maintenance"]

Extra configuration to define notification sources is defined in the Usage section.

PLUGINS_CONFIG = {
    "nautobot_circuit_maintenance": {
        "notification_sources": [
            {
              ...
            }
        ]
    }
}

Usage

All the plugin configuration is done via UI, under the Plugins tab, in the Circuit Maintenance sections.

1. Define source emails per Provider

Each Circuit Provider, that we would like to track via the Circuit Maintenance plugin, requires at least one email address under the Custom Fields -> Emails for Circuit Maintenance plugin section.

These are the source email addresses that the plugin will check and use to classify each notification for each specific provider.

2. Configure Notification Sources

Notification Sources are defined in two steps:

2.1 Define Notification Sources in configuration.py

In the PLUGINS_CONFIG, under the nautobot_circuit_maintenance key, we should define the Notification Sources that will be able later in the UI, where you will be able to validate if the authentication credentials provided are working fine or not.

There are two mandatory attributes (other keys are dependent on the integration type, and will be documented below):

• name: Name to identify the Source and will be available in the UI.
• url: URL to reach the Notification Source (i.e. imap://imap.gmail.com:993)

Currently, only IMAP and HTTPS (accounts.google.com) integrations are supported as URL scheme

IMAP

There are 2 extra attributes:

• account: Identifier (i.e. email address) to use to authenticate.
• secret: Password to IMAP authentication.

Gmail example: How to setup Gmail with App Passwords

PLUGINS_CONFIG = {
    "nautobot_circuit_maintenance": {
        "notification_sources": [
            {
                "name": "my custom name",
                "account": os.environ.get("CM_NS_1_ACCOUNT", ""),
                "secret": os.environ.get("CM_NS_1_SECRET", ""),
                "url": os.environ.get("CM_NS_1_URL", ""),
            }
        ]
    }
}

Gmail API Service Account

There are 2 extra attributes:

• account: Identifier (i.e. email address) to use to impersonate as service account.
• credentials_file: JSON file containing all the necessary data to identify the Service Account.

Enabling Gmail API access and creating a Service Account involves multiple steps that could be summarized as:

1. Create a New Project in Google Cloud Console.
2. Under APIs and Services, enable Gmail API for the selected project.
3. Still under APIs and Services, in Credentials, create a new Service Account and save the credentials file generated.
4. With Admin rights, edit the newly created Service Account and expand the Show Domain-Wide Delegation section. Enable Google Workspace Domain-wide Delegation and save the changes. Copy the Client ID shown.
5. With Super Admin rights, open the Google Workspace admin console. Navigate to Security, API controls, and select the Manage Domain Wide Delegation at the bottom of the page.
6. Add a new API client and paste in the Client ID copied earlier. In the OAuth scopes field add the scopes https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.readonly and https://mail.google.com/. Save the new client configuration by clicking Authorize.

PLUGINS_CONFIG = {
    "nautobot_circuit_maintenance": {
        "notification_sources": [
            {
                "name": "my custom name",
                "account": os.environ.get("CM_NS_1_ACCOUNT", ""),
                "credentials_file": os.environ.get("CM_NS_1_CREDENTIALS_FILE", ""),
                "url": os.environ.get("CM_NS_1_URL", ""),
            }
        ]
    }
}

2.2 Add Providers to the Notification Sources

In the Circuit Maintenance plugin UI section, there is a Notification Sources button (yellow) where you can configure the Notification Sources to track new circuit maintenance notifications from specific providers.

Because the Notification Sources are defined by the configuration, you can only view and edit providers, but not add or delete new Notification Sources via UI or API.

3. Run Handle Notifications Job

There is an asynchronous task defined as a Nautobot Job, Handle Circuit Maintenance Notifications that will connect to the emails sources defined under the Notification Sources section (step above), and will fetch new notifications received since the last notification was fetched. Each notification will be parsed using the circuit-maintenance-parser library, and if a valid parsing is executed, a new Circuit Maintenance will be created, or if it was already created, it will updated with the new data.

So, for each email notification received, several objects will be created:

3.1 Notification

Each notification received will create a related object, containing the raw data received, and linking to the corresponding parsed notification in case the circuit-maintenance-parser was able to parse it correctly.

3.2 Parsed Notification

When a notification was successfully parsed, it will create a parsed notification object, that will contain the structured output from the parser library , following the recommendation defined in draft NANOG BCOP, and a link to the related Circuit Maintenance object created.

3.3 Circuit Maintenance

The Circuit Maintenance is where all the necessary information related to a Circuit maintenance is tracked, and reuses most of the data model defined in the parser library.

Attributes:

• Name: name or identifier of the maintenance.
• Description: description of the maintenance.
• Status: current state of the maintenance.
• Start time: defined start time of the maintenance work.
• End time: defined end time of the maintenance work.
• Ack: boolean to show if the maintenance has been properly handled by the operator.
• Circuits: list of circuits and its specific impact linked to this maintenance.
• Notes: list of internal notes linked to this maintenance.
• Notifications: list of all the parsed notifications that have been processed for this maintenance.

Rest API

The plugin includes 6 API endpoints to manage its related objects, complete info in the Swagger section.

• Circuit Maintenance: /api/plugins​/circuit-maintenance​/maintenance
• Circuit Impact: /api/plugins​/circuit-maintenance​/circuitimpact
• Note: /api/plugins​/circuit-maintenance​/note

GraphQL API

Circuit Maintenance and Circuit Impact objects are available for GraphQL queries.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcomed and automatically built and tested against multiple version of Python and multiple version of Nautobot through TravisCI.

The project is packaged with a light development environment based on docker-compose to help with the local development of the project and to run the tests within TravisCI.

The project is following Network to Code software development guideline and is leveraging:

• Black, Pylint, Bandit and pydocstyle for Python linting and formatting.
• Django unit test to ensure the plugin is working properly.

CLI Helper Commands

The project is coming with a CLI helper based on invoke to help setup the development environment. The commands are listed below in 3 categories dev environment, utility and testing.

Each command can be executed with invoke <command>. All commands support the arguments --nautobot-ver and --python-ver if you want to manually define the version of Python and Nautobot to use. Each command also has its own help invoke <command> --help

Local dev environment

  build            Build all docker images.
  debug            Start Nautobot and its dependencies in debug mode.
  destroy          Destroy all containers and volumes.
  restart          Restart Nautobot and its dependencies.
  start            Start Nautobot and its dependencies in detached mode.
  stop             Stop Nautobot and its dependencies.

Utility

  cli              Launch a bash shell inside the running Nautobot container.
  create-user      Create a new user in django (default: admin), will prompt for password.
  makemigrations   Run Make Migration in Django.
  nbshell          Launch a nbshell session.

Testing

  bandit           Run bandit to validate basic static code security analysis.
  black            Run black to check that Python files adhere to its style standards.
  flake8           This will run flake8 for the specified name and Python version.
  pydocstyle       Run pydocstyle to validate docstring formatting adheres to NTC defined standards.
  pylint           Run pylint code analysis.
  tests            Run all tests for this plugin.
  unittest         Run Django unit tests for the plugin.

Questions

For any questions or comments, please check the FAQ first and feel free to swing by the Network to Code slack channel (channel #nautobot). Sign up here