Thola Nautobot

The Integration of Thola into Nautobot

Thola is a unified interface for communication with network devices. You can use it to retrieve live information of your network devices, independent of their vendor, type or model.

Installation

The first thing you need is a running Thola API. Checkout Thola's main repository to get information on how to install and start a Thola API.

Once this is done, we can install the Nautobot plugin for Thola. You need to install thola-nautobot in the same python environment as your running nautobot instance.

Download and install the plugin using:

$ pip3 install thola-nautobot

Add thola-nautobot to your local requirements in the NAUTOBOT_ROOT directory.

$ echo thola-nautobot >> $NAUTOBOT_ROOT/local_requirements.txt

In your nautobot_config.py, add thola-nautobot to the PLUGINS list. Here you can also define special configuration parameters.

PLUGINS = ["thola_nautobot"]

PLUGINS_CONFIG = {
  "thola_nautobot": {
    # ADD YOUR PARAMETERS HERE
  }
}

Next, run the database migrations.

$ nautobot-server migrate

Finally, restart the WSGI service to load the new plugin.

$ sudo systemctl restart nautobot nautobot-worker

That's it! Now you are ready to use Thola 🎉

Usage

We now want to monitor our first device with Thola. To get started, we create a Thola configuration on that device. Open the device's detail view and search for the Thola panel. Click on Enable.

Thola mainly uses SNMP for communication. Therefore, you need to enter the SNMP credentials for your device. In case you rely on the default credentials, just leave these fields empty.

Once you click on Create, the Thola API you started before will connect to your device. So make sure to have the API running now.

If successful, you find an overview over all components that you can monitor on the given device. This depends on the type of device.

Now you can inspect the live status of your device by clicking on the Live Status tab. This shows the status of all available components for your device.

Onboarding

Thola can be used to identify new devices and automatically add them to Nautobot. All you need is SNMP access to the device. Thola will then create a new device with the corresponding type and manufacturer.

Now we create our first onboarding task. In your navigation bar, go to Plugins and then look for Thola Nautobot / Onboardings. Click on the + to create a new onboarding task.

Here you can specify the IP address of the device that you want to add to Nautobot as well as the SNMP credentials. Also you need to select the site and a role for the device.

By clicking on Create, you add the onboarding task to a queue. Thola_nautobot uses Nautobot's rqworker to process the tasks. Normally this doesn't take too long so refresh the page a few times.

Once the task was successful, you can easily delete it. We onboarded our first device with Thola.

As you can see, Thola identified the manufacturer and model of the device and set the device type accordingly. There is no need to create a type or vendor in advance since Thola automatically does this for you. Furthermore, Thola assigned a name based on the device's serial number or IP. However, if you want to name the devices by hand you can disable that feature.

Plugin Config

As stated before nautobot has a config file, where plugin parameters can be set:

PLUGINS_CONFIG = {
  "thola_nautobot": {
    # ADD YOUR PARAMETERS HERE
  }
}

For thola_nautbot all parameters are optional. If a parameter is not set, the plugin will just use the default values.

Parameter	Description	Type	Default value
thola_api	Default Address and port of a running thola API	String	"http://localhost:8237"
snmp_community	Default SNMP community for a device	String	"public"
snmp_version	Default SNMP version for a device	String	"2c"
snmp_port	Default SNMP port for a device	Integer	161
snmp_discover_par_requests	Default amount of parallel connection requests used while trying to get a valid SNMP connection	Integer	5
snmp_discover_timeout	Default timeout in seconds used while trying to get a valid SNMP connection	Integer	2
snmp_discover_retries	Default number of retries used while trying to get a valid SNMP connection	Integer	0
onboarding_create_models	If true, Thola will create device types and manufacturers for onboarded devices	Boolean	True
onboarding_device_name	If true, Thola will automatically add names to onboarded devices	Boolean	True

API

The plugin comes with several API endpoints.

Method	Route	Description
GET	/plugins/thola_nautobot/config	Returns list of all Thola configurations
POST	/plugins/thola_nautobot/config	Creates a new Thola configuration
GET	/plugins/thola_nautobot/config/{id}	Returns details of a given configuration
PUT	/plugins/thola_nautobot/config/{id}	Updates a given Thola configuration
DELETE	/plugins/thola_nautobot/config/{id}	Deletes a given Thola configuration
GET	/plugins/thola_nautobot/config/{id}/livedata	Returns available live data for a given Thola device
GET	/plugins/thola_nautobot/onboarding	Returns list of all Thola onboarding tasks
POST	/plugins/thola_nautobot/onboarding	Creates a new Thola onboarding task
GET	/plugins/thola_nautobot/onboarding/{id}	Returns details of a given onboarding task
PUT	/plugins/thola_nautobot/onboarding/{id}	Updates a given Thola onboarding task
DELETE	/plugins/thola_nautobot/onboarding/{id}	Deletes a given Thola onboarding task
GET	/plugins/thola_nautobot/onboarding/{id}/onboard	Queue a run for a given onboarding task

Any questions?

Feel free to look at the main repository of Thola. Also, checkout our website.

Missing a device?

If you run a device that Thola doesn't support yet, check out our documentation. There you find a full explanation on how to add a new device type into Thola. We are happy to see your contributions!