How to find devices using filtering on certain Names with common aspects using REST

Products

• Network Observability
• CA Performance Management

Issue/Introduction

Searching for a number of similar devices that include shared aspects in their name. For example, all contain the letters _RW to indicate that they're routers. How can this search be implemented using REST in CA Performance Management (CAPM)?

Environment

DX NetOps CAPM all currently supported releases

Resolution

Create a file to contain the XML formatted filter. For example /tmp/filter.xml

This filter file will contain the filtering required, with the following syntax:

<FilterSelect xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="filter.xsd">
<Filter>
    <Item.Name type="CONTAINS">_RW</Item.Name>
</Filter>
<Select use="exclude" isa="exclude">
<Item use="exclude">
    <Name use="include" />
</Item>
<Device use="exclude">
    <HostName use="include" />
    <PrimaryIPAddress use="include" />
    <ContactStatus use="include" />
</Device>
<Lifecycle use="include"></Lifecycle>
</Select>
</FilterSelect>

The above filter code searches on the Item.Name for any discovered Items that CONTAINS the phrase _RW anywhere within the Item name.

The line <Select use="exclude" isa="exclude"> means exclude everything but note, the following lines then have includes that override the exclude for the attributes specified. So the section that follows:

<Item use="exclude">
    <Name use="include" />
</Item>

Means exclude all attributes of the Item Except its Name. Then the section after that:

<Device use="exclude">
    <HostName use="include" />
    <PrimaryIPAddress use="include" />
    <ContactStatus use="include" />
</Device>

Means exclude all device attributes Except the Hostname, IP address and Contact Status in the output.

 

You can run the above using either curl on the command line or a REST API client using a POST request.

Using curl in this example, the XML output is displayed as one long line without any formatting, making it very difficult to read, so pipe it into a command line formatting utility such as xmllint which will append a new line to each line of formatted XML output:

xmllint --format - 

 

So when you run it, add the xmllint utility through a pipe as follows:

curl -kv -u admin -s -X POST -d @/tmp/filter.xml  http://<DA_HOST>:8581/rest/devices/filtered --header "Content-Type: application/xml" | xmllint --format - > /tmp/output.xml

The above will output something similar to the following in the resulting /tmp/output.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<DeviceList>

  <Device version="1.0.0">

    <ID>7235</ID>

    <ContactStatus>DOWN</ContactStatus>

    <PrimaryIPAddress>198.162.0.3</PrimaryIPAddress>

    <Lifecycle version="1.0.0">

      <TimeStamp>Thu Jan 1 0:00:00 1970 +0000</TimeStamp>

      <State>ACTIVE</State>

    </Lifecycle>

    <Item version="1.0.0">

      <Name>Sim-YYY_RW</Name>

    </Item>

  </Device>

  <Device version="1.0.0">

    <ID>7525</ID>

    <ContactStatus>UP</ContactStatus>

    <PrimaryIPAddress>198.162.0.2</PrimaryIPAddress>

    <Lifecycle version="1.0.0">

      <TimeStamp>Thu Jan 1 0:00:00 1970 +0000</TimeStamp>

      <State>ACTIVE</State>

    </Lifecycle>

    <Item version="1.0.0">

      <Name>Sim-XXX_RW</Name>

    </Item>

  </Device>

</DeviceList>