Run your first real Ansible automation with ad hoc commands — single-task, one-off commands executed straight from the CLI, no playbook required. This lab covers what they are and where they shine: quick triage during an outage, checking error counters, rebooting or restarting services across a group of devices, or pushing a fast patch. It's the most direct way to get hands-on with Ansible before building out full playbooks.

This video introduces Ansible as an automation tool — why its simple, human-readable YAML playbooks make it accessible across teams, and how its agentless, SSH-based architecture lets it manage systems without installing anything on them. Ansible excels at automating repetitive tasks and orchestrating complex workflows across many systems, making it an ideal way to manage your infrastructure as code across its full lifecycle. At the simplest level, its architecture consists of control nodes — the computers running Ansible — and managed nodes, the devices in your infrastructure you're automating. Managed nodes get added to your inventory and fed into the control node through a playbook: the playbook defines what you want to automate, and the inventory defines where. You'll also see how modules, plugins, and the CLI tie into that same workflow... In the first lab, "Ansible Engine Setup", you'll set up your Ansible development environment on an Ubuntu jump host, then write and run your first playbook to automatically back up configurations across simulated Cisco IOS-XE and NX-OS routers

Learners will build a network assurance workflow that connects live device health data from Cisco Catalyst Center with the NetBox source of truth. The playbook queries device health scores, evaluates them against a configurable threshold, identifies degraded devices, and writes the resulting health status back into NetBox for operational visibility.