Retrieve ASM Policy Facts from the F5 BIG-IP Platform Network Infrastructure

How to retrieve the ASM Policy Facts from the F5 BIG-IP Platform Network Infrastructure using Ansible Network f5networks.f5_modules.

April 26, 2023

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Retrieve ASM Policy Facts from the F5 Network Infrastructure

Businesses nowadays are using DevOps and automation to speed up application development and eliminate IT bottlenecks. Network automation is the next frontier. We can use Ansible to automate application delivery services like identity and access management, web application security, and TCP optimization. Combining together with the F5 services, we can automate and orchestrate using Ansible through a series of integrations with the F5 BIG-IP platform API modules. Ansible F5 modules enable the most common use cases and follow best practices while providing an agentless solution that makes use of the native APIs of BIG-IP, improving configuration and automation speed and consistency.

Code

The “F5Networks.F5_Modules” Ansible collection interacts with F5 infrastructure. Install in our system using the ansible-galaxy tool:

ansible-galaxy collection install f5networks.f5_modules

We are going to use the following F5 modules:

f5networks.f5_modules.bigip_device_info module – Collect information from F5 BIG-IP devices

The following “f5.yml” Ansible Playbook retrieves the ASM Policy Facts Full from the F5 infrastructure and prints them on the screen:

---
- name: Retrieve ASM Policy Facts Full
  hosts: all
  connection: local
  collections:
    - f5networks.f5_modules
  gather_facts: true
  vars:
    provider:
      server: f5.example.com
      user: admin
      password: mypassword
      validate_certs: false
      server_port: 443 
 
  tasks:
    - name: Export policy in XML format
      bigip_device_info:
        gather_subset:
          - asm-policies
        provider: "{{ provider }}"
      register: device_facts
      delegate_to: localhost
 
    - name:  Print ASM Policy Facts Full
      ansible.builtin.debug: 
        var : device_facts | json_query ("asm_policies [*].name")
        
    - name: print list    
      ansible.builtin.debug:
        var : policies_list

Recap

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