First of all, NAPALM stands for Network Automation and Programmability Abstraction Layer with Multivendor support. NAPALM is a Python library that provides different methods or functions to retrieve the data from network device or to manipulate the configuration. It uses the Unified API to interact with network devices.

Cisco IOS doesn’t have any API, so, NAPALM uses the Netmiko to interact with Cisco IOS. This particular library has made things very easy for Network Engineers as comparison to Paramiko which was purely an implementation of SSHv2 where it was required to manage everything at low level like connecting to the device, manipulating the output, and managing many other things, but, in this case, everything is easy. NAPALM can also be integrated with Ansible.

As for the configuration management, This library provides the function to push configuration to network device, rollback the configuration if required and also provides the comparison between running configuration and the configuration that is about to be pushed for revision that which things are going to be added or removed from it. This is something really great.

I’m using the same topology that I was using during my lab with Paramiko and Netmiko. As usual, At the end, I’m just attaching one of the random screenshot from my lab where it is just retrieval of arp table, nothing big, but yeah that’s what it is… NAPALM