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Background A question that came up during a recent NetBox training session was: "How should authentication credentials be provided within NetBox webhooks?" For example, you may need to send a webhook from NetBox to an external system such as: * CI/CD platforms * internal APIs * configuration management systems * notification

Typically, when working with an LLM, you send your data along with a prompt and receive a response. But this pattern often introduces issues, especially with public LLMs, due to security concerns and token bloat. There is a different pattern we can use: the Schema-Driven LLM Query Pattern. With this

One of the big announcements from AutoCon4 last week came from the team behind Netpicker and Slurpit. They have now released major upgrades, and have aligned the product catalog under the umbrella of the Flock9 platform, bringing Netpicker and Slurpit even closer together. The TL;DR * Netpicker AI Assistant Netpicker

Within this post, we are going to explore the network automation platform Netpicker. Netpicker is a Python-powered network automation platform that provides various features to allow you to configure, back up, and perform compliance testing across 150+ vendors. Because it’s built using open-source libraries such as Netmiko, Pytest, TextFSM,

Introduction When you're working with structured data in Python, there are two common options: TypedDict (from the typing module) and Pydantic (a popular validation library). Both are useful, but they serve different needs depending on whether you prioritize static type checking, runtime validation, or performance. In this post,

If I’m honest, I feel like Jinja gets a bad rap. Its role is often thought to be only for generating network configurations. And with model-driven automation being on the rise it can feel like Jinja is a legacy, tainted tool that we should be moving away from. I’

Overview Hi all, welcome back to another blog post on Ansible. I hope most of you are familiar with spine and leaf architecture, where each leaf switch connects to every spine switch to create a non-blocking, scalable fabric. In this example, we will have two spine switches and six leaf

When writing code, clarity and maintainability are everything. One of the most powerful design principles you can apply to achieve this is CQS - Command Query Separation. What is CQS? CQS (Command Query Separation) means: A function should either do something (a Command) or answer something (a Query) - never

Overview When working with Ansible, you often deal with structured data made up of nested dictionaries and lists. This could be anything from device configurations to network status or inventory data. Accessing the specific piece of data you need can get messy, especially when the structure is deep or repetitive.