RESEARCH OF MEANS OF AUTOMATING WORK WITH NETWORK EQUIPMENT

Abstract

Today, IT companies face the big challenge of reducing the number of hours it takes network engineers to configure the network equipment in organizations of medium and large size. One of the most time-consuming tasks is to change the network equipment configuration, which requires the execution of a consistent set of commands. With such an approach, there is a high likelihood of error and typos, resulting in a decrease in network stability. The purpose of the present work is to develop an automated methodology for managing network equipment that will meet the requirements of an open system, and have flexible and widespread development methods. The proposed strategy should be an alternative to the management solution offered by network equipment vendors. The methodology for solving the task is to formalize the approach to configuration and diagnosing the operation of network equipment. To support legacy hardware, mainly the command line access is considered. The scientific novelty of the work is covered in the proposed approach of formalized diagnostics and configuration using existing tools for automating remote access and tools for analyzing unstructured texts. Conclusions. The paper examines the most widely used configuration management systems and offers a new system for configuring existing network hardware based on modules such as Netmiko and TextFSM for text response processing. The offered modules allow the solution to achieve higher flexibility compared to the considered tools.