Automating Network Deployment with Cisco DNA Center and Cisco Action Orchestrator

Now, this is a story all about how

Five All Star Dev. Advocates worked together on a KR

And I’d like to take a minute

Just sit right there

I’ll tell you how I lead an initiative called “Multi-Domain Automation” for real

The All Star Line up:

Matt Denapoli: Automating Meraki Deployments with Cisco Action Orchestrator
Stuart Clark: Cisco SD-WAN deployments with Cisco Action Orchestrator
John McDonough: Configuring Cisco ACI and Cisco UCS Deployments with Cisco Action Orchestrator
Hank Preston: Multi Domain Sandbox and Infrastructure support
Me: 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 graphic — 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:

Discover and provision the network in the new branch
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

If you are looking to get started with DNA Center, here are some DNA-Center resources for you.

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

multi-domain DNA Center — 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.

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.

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.

would you like to get a deeper dive on what we’ve talked about here? Join me on May 7th to get a deep dive into what we’ve spoken about here. I will go through the APIs as well as show you how I’ve built this in CAO.