We currently use Ansible playbooks to add or delete network devices to our various NMS tools. I want to add Forward Networks to this job so newly added devices or old devices being removed are part of this automation. When FN discovers a device it appears to use sysName for the “Name” of the device. The API however requires me to provide the name value. Is there anyway to just use the management IP to add it to FN and have FN set the name like it does during its own discovery?
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When adding a new device using the API, what you are actually doing is adding the name of the Source used for collection. Forward Networks is unaware of the device name as configured on the device until a collection is run. So you must provide a Source name when adding a new Source/device to Sources.
You could run a external script after collection that compared device name and source name, and updated the source name when there is a descrepancy.
Keep in mind there are scenarios where device name and source name will be different. Namely, if the source is a host firewall with multiple firewall instances within it. In this scenario, a single source is associated with multiple devices in inventory, so each device name must be different. (And in this case Forward automatically provides a different name to each device collected from a single source based on the source name).
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