How to pull device files from multiple devices at once via the API

Hi Forward Networks team,

I am looking at the API, specifically the call to get a device's data files.

I can get the files for a single device at a time by just putting in the hostname in the parameters, however I was wondering if there is a parameter which will allow me to pull from multiple devices at once.

For example lets say I want to pull from devices ABC, DEF, GHI

I want to pull from every device that starts with ABC*

Is this something that can be done?

Or would another possibility be to create a separate group of devices which includes all the devices I want to pull from and then just run the GET call on that device group.

Kind regards,

Sebastian

Page 1 / 1

Hello @Sebastian Coros You could do this with NQE knowing the limitations of NQE pagination. The example below takes a list of OS types and deviceName globs to select the LLDP output collected in a snapshot.

The only other solution would be to call NQE to gather the list of device names and iterating over that by calling the device files API as you mentioned.

Example:

@query
query(Operating_Systems: List<OS>, Device_Name_Patterns: List<String>) =
  foreach device in network.devices
  where length(Operating_Systems) == 0 ||
        device.platform.os in Operating_Systems
  where length(Device_Name_Patterns) == 0 ||
        max(foreach pattern in Device_Name_Patterns
            select matches(device.name, pattern))
  let outputs = device.outputs
  foreach command in outputs.commands
  where command.commandType == CommandType.LLDP
  select { deviceName: device.name, data: command.response };

Here I am referencing the query committed in NQE Library by queryID and populating parameters to filer the output. Again just be aware you might have to deal with pagination of the NQE API call.

Execution:

curl -X 'POST' \
  'https://fwd.app/api/nqe?networkId=<networkid>' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Basic <BASE64 id:secrets> \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{

  "queryId": "<queryId>",
  "parameters": {
    "Device_Name_Patterns": s"sjc*"],
   "Operating_Systems": s"ARISTA_EOS"]
  }
}'

Hi @GaryB, thank you for the response.

I am trying to make a NQE and run this query but it seems that no matter what I set the parameters as the query always returns 0 results.

Any idea why?