netdisco VS ntc-templates

if it's an ongoing task, perhaps http://netdisco.org/ would be useful for you?

Currently the Arubas are managed by CLI/NetDisco. Its great, but NetDisco cant do much beyond identifying devices, and setting the untagged vlan - and I need to break out putty for anything else.

Netdisco does this. http://netdisco.org/

I'm not really sure if the IOS modules could really give you what you're looking for...at least not those ones. You may want to look into the cli_parse module with the ntc_templates parser (requires the python ntc_templates package). They have lots of predefined textfsm templates in their repository. IMO this is the easiest way to extract current-state information from a running device, assuming there is a template already available.

I've created basic 'network maps' (more of a graph theory term and related to computer networks) to show the relationship of BGP neighbors in a hub and spoke DMVPN network (~200 spokes with four hubs) and then I used a gradient color scheme to show which BGP neighbors were bouncing the most frequently over time with red being really bad and green being healthy and the gradient was the number of BGP bounces over a time period. Drawing the relationships between BGP peers would be the same as drawing the relationships between CDP neighbors. Use Pythons ntp-tempates package to parse CDP neighbour output and parameterize it, then create a list of all CDP neighbour mappings and feed that into graphviz as nodes (the switches) and edges (the CDP neighbor relationships). It'll take care of drawing it to PDF for you and you can change the different layout types and create groups of devices to place them closer to each other.

I would use something like TextFSM with NTC Templates. However, this does mean you will run the show against the configuration components... show TACACS instead of show RUN.

Link to the template file straight from NTC Templates.

Learn about using NTC-templates to parse the data and store it as a registered variable. There’s a TextFSM template included for ASA show route

I haven't really decided if I should just download a bunch of templates from here: https://github.com/networktocode/ntc-templates

Template is here: https://github.com/networktocode/ntc-templates/blob/master/ntc_templates/templates/arista_eos_show_version.textfsm