Integration of Peering Manager

Peering Manager is more than a simple documentation tool. It can integrate itself with other tools such as PeeringDB and NAPALM. Actually, integrating Peering Manager with these tools will allow you to get the most of it.

Working with PeeringDB

We will consider that you are familiar with this well-known website. It allows people to document the details of their networks and where they can peer. PeeringDB exposes an API which allows other tools to use its data. Peering Manager can do that and if your network has a clean PeeringDB record, you can, for example, import automatically all the Internet Exchanges where your network can be found.

To speed things up, a local PeeringDB cache can be built and kept up-to-date inside the Peering Manager's database. You can found how to do that in the Setup > Scheduled Tasks documentation.

If a valid PEERINGDB_API_KEY is configured, Peering Manager will sync Email Contacts from Networks in PeeringDB to be used in the builtin Email functionality.

Working with NAPALM

NAPALM is a framework which can be used to interact with compatible network devices. Its strength is that it exposes functions that will automatically do what is necessary given the device type. There is a page detailing what functions are supported depending on the device and its OS.

Peering Manager, using NAPALM, can perform some tasks on your network devices to avoid you the trouble of doing them manually. For example, it can push the proper configuration for your peering sessions on an Internet Exchange if you have (inside Peering Manager) created a configuration template, a router and linked those to the Internet Exchange object.

Some setup are required to use NAPALM. A valid user and password combination must be provided otherwise Peering Manager will not know how to connect to your devices. The platform for your router must also be supported (any choices in they given list are supported NAPALM platforms except Other).

So in your configuration file you must at least have these lines.

# NAPALM
NAPALM_USERNAME = 'peeringmanageruser'
NAPALM_PASSWORD = 'letsfindabetterpassword'

There are two more optional configuration lines which are:

NAPALM_TIMEOUT = 30 # Timeout which defaults to 30 seconds
NAPALM_ARGS    = {} # Python dictionary of supported NAPALM arguments
                    # https://napalm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/support/index.html#list-of-supported-optional-arguments

With these lines in your configuration Peering Manager should be able to connect on the routers that you have created inside its database. You can always go to the details view of a router and click on the Ping button to check if everything should work as expected.