Switch Inventory
Switch Automation Jobs is the read-only history of access-switch operations, with status badges and a hover preview of the exact config the engine would push.
What the Switch Automation Jobs page is for
The Switch Automation Jobs page is a read-only history of every access-switch operation your platform attempted while allocating, deploying, or releasing IP addresses. It records what was attempted on each switch port — not what is configured — so you can confirm a VLAN or Layer-3 change actually reached the device, or diagnose why it did not. Switches themselves, along with their SSH and SNMP credentials and port mappings, are managed elsewhere; this page is purely the audit trail of the automation engine.
How to reach this page
This page lives under IP Address Management. Open IPAM from the sidebar, then click the Switches button in the toolbar at the top right of the IPAM page. A Back to IPAM link at the top left of the Switch Automation Jobs page returns you to the address manager.
The Switches button (and this whole page) belongs to the network and locations feature set. If you do not run physical switches, you will simply see an empty job history.
Reading the job history
The page shows a single card titled Recent Automation Jobs with the help text "Hover a dry-run entry to preview the switch config that would have been pushed." Each row is one operation the engine performed (or chose to skip) against one switch port.
Table columns
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Time | Date and time the job ran, down to the second. |
| Switch | The name of the access switch the job targeted, or a dash if none was resolved. |
| Port | The switch port the change applied to — the port name, or an interface index (shown as if<number>) when no name is known. |
| Action | The operation requested, such as setting an access VLAN on a port, enabling or disabling a port, or assigning/removing a Layer-3 address. |
| Trigger | What caused the job — for example an IP allocation, an IP release, or a deploy event in IPAM. |
| VLAN | The VLAN ID involved in the change, or a dash if the action is not VLAN-related. |
| Status | A coloured badge: OK (green) for success, Failed (red), or Skipped (amber). A dash appears when no status was recorded. |
| Detail | A short reason or error message — for example "no switch port mapping". Long text is truncated; hover the cell to read the full message. |
Filtering and refreshing
- Filter by status. Use the dropdown in the top-right of the card to narrow the list. The choices are All (default), Success, Failed, and Skipped / Dry-run. Selecting a value reloads the table immediately.
- Investigate a problem. Set the filter to Failed to jump straight to operations that did not apply, then read the Detail column for each to see why.
- Refresh. Click the Refresh button at the top right of the page to reload the latest jobs at any time (the icon spins while loading).
Previewing the exact switch changes (hover preview)
Rows that carry a planned change are interactive. When you hover such a row, the cursor turns to a help pointer and a dark popover appears, headed "Exact transport-level ops the driver would send", listing precisely what would be sent to the switch. This is the heart of the page — it lets you verify exactly what would change before you ever enable live pushes.
The popover header also names the driver used for that switch, and the body lists each operation in order. Depending on the switch type, an operation is shown as one of the following:
- SSH — the literal command-line configuration lines.
- EAPI — the command set for switches that accept an API command list.
- SNMP — the individual SET operations, each with its object identifier, type, and value.
- NETCONF — the configuration sent as XML.
- Skipped / Error — a note explaining that no operation was needed, or that the preview could not be produced.
When a switch type does not provide its own preview, the page falls back to a normalized, easy-to-read configuration summary and labels it accordingly, so you always see what the change means even without a device-specific preview.
The preview is informational only — hovering never sends anything to a switch. It reflects what the engine planned at the time the job was recorded.
Understanding Skipped jobs
A Skipped status with the detail "no switch port mapping" is the most common entry, and it is not an error. It means the address-management step completed normally, but the subnet or address involved was not bound to a physical switch port, so there was nothing for the engine to push — no switch was touched. To turn skipped jobs into live changes, the relevant switch must have its credentials and a port mapping recorded on its network device entry on the Inventory page.
Turning automation on
Whether the engine only logs intended changes or actually pushes them is controlled in Settings, not on this page. Open Settings, stay on the General tab, and scroll to the Features section. Make sure the IPAM feature toggle is on; switch-automation controls appear nested beneath it, under a heading reading "Allocate on Switch via SNMP". That control offers three modes:
| Mode | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Off | No switch configuration is pushed at all. |
| Dry-run | The engine logs the intended changes without touching any device. These are the rows you can hover to preview. |
| On | The engine pushes VLAN and Layer-3 configuration to the switch on address-management and deploy events. Selecting this mode asks you to confirm, since it pushes live config on every IPAM allocation. |
The switch-automation modes are only available when IPAM is set to Automatic mode (chosen just above the same control). In Manual mode the modes are greyed out with the note "(requires Automatic IPAM mode)". Start in Dry-run, confirm the previewed operations on this page look correct for your switches, then switch to On.
Practical tips
- Use the hover preview during the Dry-run phase to validate that the generated VLAN and Layer-3 commands match your network's conventions before enabling live pushes.
- If a job shows Failed, read its Detail message first — most failures trace back to credentials or reachability defined on the device entry in Inventory.
- This is a history view: it does not let you edit, retry, or re-run a job. Corrective changes are made on the address record in IPAM or on the switch entry in Inventory, which then generate fresh jobs you can review here.