How do you test that your network is healthy? You probably ping a few things, run some show commands, and watch for open trouble tickets. I don’t think I’ll stir up a ton of controversy by saying that’s a really bad method. With the move towards network automation, NetDevOps, and Network Reliability Engineering (NRE), we need to have robust, repeatable tests to check the state of the network from Layer 1 to 7.
pyATS is an open source network test framework that was built by software developers for network developers. It provides all the tools automation engineers need to describe test cases, run jobs, gather reports, and make the entire process part of your network automation pipeline. In this talk, we’ll look at everything you need to write your first few test cases, and discuss strategies for what you should test, and when.