network-aiops

Disclaimer: This is a community-maintained open-source project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Cisco, Arista, Juniper, NetBox Labs, or any network vendor. Vendor and product names are trademarks of their respective owners. Source code is publicly auditable at github.com/AIops-tools/Network-AIops under the MIT license.

Governed multi-vendor network device operations for AI agents — 33 MCP tools, every one wrapped with the bundled @governed_tool harness: a local unified audit log under ~/.network-aiops/, token/runaway budget guard, undo-token recording, and descriptive risk-tier labels. Credentials (device passwords + the NetBox token) are kept in an encrypted store (secrets.enc), never plaintext on disk.

Devices are reached over NAPALM; an optional NetBox block adds source-of-truth lookups.

Standalone: the governance harness is bundled in the package (network_aiops.governance) — network-aiops has no external skill-family dependency. Coverage focuses on common device operations and is not yet exhaustive.

Verification status: the test suite is mock-based; not yet validated against live devices — self-testable with cEOS / vMX / containerlab. See docs/VERIFICATION.md.

What works

Read device facts, interfaces (+ counters/IP), BGP/LLDP neighbors (summary and detail), ARP/MAC tables, VLANs, route lookups, hardware environment, optics, NTP, users, SNMP info, VRFs, and an aggregated device_health; run read-only RCA diagnostics that flag down/erroring/flapping interfaces and unhealthy BGP neighbors — each finding citing the measured number that tripped it; back up the running config, dry-run a config diff, and merge/replace/rollback config — across the five core NAPALM platforms below. Optional NetBox lookups (devices + interfaces) confirm intended state before a change.

NAPALM does not implement every getter on every platform; an unsupported getter returns a teaching error ("not supported by the <driver> driver") rather than crashing. Secrets are never returned — get_users redacts password hashes and get_snmp_information redacts community strings.

Supported devices

Additional platforms (Nokia SR OS / SR Linux, Huawei VRP, etc.) are reachable via NAPALM community drivers but are not officially tested here. Need one? See Contributing.

Supported actions

What this tool does, and does not, decide

It delivers multi-vendor network device (NAPALM) + NetBox operations — reads and writes — accurately and efficiently, and records every one of them. It does not decide whether a write is allowed to happen. That is the agent's judgement, or the permission of the account you connect it with: log in with a device account at a read-only privilege level (and give NetBox a read-only API token), and the writes fail at the server — the place that actually owns the permission.

So there is no read-only switch, no policy file, no approval gate to configure. The one thing the tool guarantees is that nothing is silent: every call, over MCP and over the CLI alike, lands an audit row in ~/.network-aiops/audit.db, and destructive writes still capture their before-state and record an inverse where one exists.

Each tool declares a risk_level, carried into the audit row as a descriptive tier (none/confirm/review) — so a reviewer can see at a glance that a row was a high-risk delete. It is a label, not a gate.

Running a smaller / local model? See agent-guardrails.md — it lists the guardrails this tool enforces for you (so you don't spend prompt budget restating them) and gives a ready-made system prompt for what's left.

Quick Start

As a Claude Code plugin

One install gives an agent both the skill and the MCP server:

/plugin marketplace add AIops-tools/marketplace
/plugin install network-aiops@aiops-tools

The MCP server is fetched with uv and pinned to the package version this plugin declares, so an audit row can be traced back to the code that wrote it. Credentials are still configured with network-aiops init — see below.

As an OpenClaw plugin

The same bundle is published on ClawHub, where one install delivers the skill and its MCP server together:

openclaw plugins install clawhub:@zw008/network-aiops
openclaw skills info network-aiops          # expect: Visible to model: yes

Restart the OpenClaw gateway afterwards so it loads the plugin. The MCP server is fetched with uv, pinned to this exact release, so uvx has to be on PATH — without it the skill still installs but reports Visible to model: no. Credentials are configured exactly as below.

As a CLI or standalone MCP server

uv tool install network-aiops
network-aiops init                                  # wizard: device + driver + host + encrypted password
network-aiops doctor
network-aiops device facts -t core-sw1
network-aiops device health -t core-sw1
network-aiops diagnose interface-health -t core-sw1   # worst-first interface RCA
network-aiops diagnose bgp -t core-sw1                # worst-first BGP-neighbor RCA
network-aiops config backup -t core-sw1 -o core-sw1.cfg

Playbook: triage a flaky uplink before touching config

# 1. Ask the device what's actually wrong — findings are ranked worst-first and
#    each cites the measured value (error count, last-flap seconds, uptime).
network-aiops diagnose interface-health -t core-sw1
network-aiops diagnose bgp -t core-sw1

# 2. If interface-health flags a link admin-up/oper-down with climbing errors and
#    BGP shows the peer on that path recently reset, you have your root cause: a
#    physical-layer fault (cable/optic) resetting the session — not routing.

# 3. Confirm intended state, then remediate with the governed, audited path.
network-aiops device counters -t core-sw1
network-aiops config diff -t core-sw1 -f fix.cfg      # dry-run the change first

Create ~/.network-aiops/config.yaml:

devices:
  - name: core-sw1            # used as -t core-sw1
    driver: eos               # ios | nxos | nxos_ssh | iosxr | eos | junos
    host: 10.0.0.1
    username: admin
    optional_args:            # passed verbatim to NAPALM (optional)
      secret: enable-pw       # enable/secret
      port: 443
# Optional source-of-truth:
netbox:
  url: https://netbox.example.com

Secrets are stored encrypted in ~/.network-aiops/secrets.enc (Fernet/AES + scrypt-derived key; chmod 600) — never in config.yaml or a plaintext .env. Device passwords are keyed by device name; the NetBox token uses the reserved name netbox-token:

network-aiops init                     # interactive wizard (recommended)
network-aiops secret set core-sw1      # store a device password (hidden prompt)
network-aiops secret set netbox-token  # store the NetBox API token
network-aiops secret list              # names only — values are never printed
network-aiops secret migrate           # import a legacy plaintext .env, then delete it