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The Cisco IOS/IOS-XE operating system is a source of inspiration for many other vendors. The internet is full of guides on how to configure a typical Cisco router for SOHO scenarios. However, unlike consumer-grade routers, configuring something like Cisco IOS requires caution. If you don’t think things through, the router may start "living its own life" and end up, for instance, as a DDoS amplification tool.

Hey everyone! This is a follow-up article on a local Cisco Russia DevNet Marathon online event I attended in May 2020. It was a series of educational webinars on network automation followed by daily challenges based on the discussed topics.
On a final day, the participants were challenged to automate a topology analysis and visualization of an arbitrary network segment and, optionally, track and visualize the changes.

The task was definitely not trivial and not widely covered in public blog posts. In this article, I would like to break down my own solution that finally took first place and describe the selected toolset and considerations.

Let's get started.