tubbz-alt / cisco-cloud-operations-bot

Cisco Cloud Operations Bot - Q2FY20 ASIC Submission

Cisco Cloud Operations Bot (COB)

For the FY20Q2 ASIC challenge, we wanted to explore and interact with our ever-growing cloud offerings. Cloud Operations Bot was created to show how Cisco's cloud offerings - with their API-driven designs - can be interfaced without even accessing the various dashboards that exist. For this submission, our focus was to prove the ease of interoperability between Webex Teams, Meraki Dashboard, and Umbrella. We were specifically excited to work with the newest addition to Webex Teams: Adaptive Cards.

Business/Technical Challenge

Cloud Operations Bot seeks to prove the value and ease that comes from having cloud offerings with API-first mentalities. Because of this foundation, we can work across multiple products through an easy-to-use interface presented by cards within Webex Teams. This is extremely beneficial for everything from unitask requirements like pulling a particular report to more complicated workflows. Better still, workflows using cards are intuitive enough to be used by non-technical staff and powerful enough for advanced tasks needed by power users.

Proposed Solution

Cisco Cloud Operations Bot is a solution that further extends Cisco's vision for unified cloud-based visibility and the benefits that customers gain by going all-in with Cisco! We accomplish this by providing a Webex Teams bot that has access to all of the customer's cloud accounts. COB provides a card-based system that makes it easy for users to not only read output from these accounts, but even provide complex inputs in a user-friendly manner.

We focused on proving the ease of connecting 3 of Cisco's different cloud offerings: Webex Teams (collab), Meraki Dashboard (EN), and Umbrella (security). But this merely scratches the surface given Cisco's focus on cloud platforms. COB could easily be expanded to interact with Defense Orchestrator, DNA Center Cloud, Intersight, Webex Calling, and more!

As we like to say... "The sky's the limit with Cloud Operations Bot!"

Cisco Products Technologies/ Services

Our solution levegerages the following Cisco technologies:

• Meraki Dashboard
• Umbrella
• Webex Teams

Going forward, our solution could leverage these Cisco technologies as well:

• Defense Orchestrator
• DNA Center Cloud
• Intersight
• ... and more!

Team Members

• Bradford Ingersoll [email protected] - US Commercial East
• Eric Scott [email protected] - US Public Sector North East

Solution Components

• Python 3.7.3
• Python Library - webexteamsbot
• Python Library - Meraki Dashboard API
• Python Library - matplotlib

Usage

Being a Webex Teams bot, running Cloud Operations Bot simply requires filling out an .env file with the specified account parameters and a python-based environment that can host the bot to remain running.

Once the bot is running, join a 1:1 converstation or add Cloud Operations Bot to a room and begin using it!

Installation

1. Clone this repo

git clone https://github.com/CiscoSE/cisco-cloud-operations-bot.git

2. Create a Python 3 environment (virtualenv preferred)

python3 -m venv venv

3. Activate the virtual environment

source venv/bin/active

4. Install the required modules using the requirements.txt

pip install -r example-requirements.txt

5. Rename the dummy.env file to .env and fill out with appropriate info

mv dummy.env .env
nano/vi .env

Documentation

• Webex Teams - Adaptive Cards
• Adaptive Cards
• Meraki Dashboard API Docs
• Umbrella API Docs

License

Provided under Cisco Sample Code License, for details see LICENSE

Code of Conduct

Our code of conduct is available here

Contributing

See our contributing guidelines here