Using Python Scripts for Common Operations Automation Tasks

Python is a popular language for automating operations tasks due to its rich third‑party libraries.

Typical automation scenarios include connecting to remote servers, parsing log files, monitoring system status, batch deploying software, and performing backup and recovery.

Remote execution can be done with the paramiko library for SSH connections, as shown in the example code:

<code>import paramiko
ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()
ssh.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())
ssh.connect(hostname='remote.server.com', username='user', password='password')
stdin, stdout, stderr = ssh.exec_command('ls -l /tmp')</code>

Log parsing can be achieved with the regex library to extract error messages, illustrated by a sample script:

<code>import regex
with open('log.txt', 'r') as f:
    log = f.read()
errors = regex.findall(r'ERROR:\s+(.*)', log)
for error in errors:
    print(error)</code>

System monitoring and alerting can be implemented with psutil to obtain CPU usage and smtplib to send email alerts, as demonstrated below:

<code>import psutil
import smtplib
cpu_percent = psutil.cpu_percent()
if cpu_percent > 80:
    server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.example.com')
    server.login('user', 'password')
    message = f'CPU usage exceeds 80%: {cpu_percent}%'
    subject = 'Alert: High CPU Usage'
    server.sendmail('[email protected]', '[email protected]', subject, message)
    server.quit()</code>

Batch deployment can be simplified using the fabric library, with a task that runs apt-get update on multiple hosts:

<code>from fabric import task
@task
def update_system(c):
    c.run('apt-get update')</code>

Backup and recovery can be performed with the standard shutil module, using copy for files and copytree for directories:

<code>import shutil
shutil.copy('/path/to/file', '/path/to/backup/file')
shutil.copytree('/path/to/dir', '/path/to/backup/dir')</code>

Additional Python tools such as pytest , selenium , numpy , pandas , matplotlib , and machine‑learning libraries further extend its usefulness for sysadmins.