Chapter 12: Python Dictionaries for Network Engineers

Learn how Python dictionaries model your network’s logic and power automation scripts from config parsing to telemetry analysis.

Author

Leonardo Furtado
July 28, 2025

Why Dictionaries Are Essential in Network Automation

In this post, we dive into one of Python’s most powerful and flexible data structures: the dictionary. As a network engineer automating tasks with Python, dictionaries will soon become one of your most frequently used tools, and for good reason.

Dictionaries enable you to represent and manipulate structured data using a key-value model that mirrors real-world network concepts, including interface names and their statuses, device hostnames and IP addresses, routing tables and next hops, telemetry data, and more.

They’re ideal for:

  • Modeling devices and their attributes

  • Organizing interface telemetry

  • Storing parsed configurations

  • Mapping routes and reachability

  • Parsing and interacting with API responses (JSON, YAML)

In this article, we’ll explore what dictionaries are, how to create and access them, how they behave internally, and how they’re used in network automation workflows. You’ll also walk through code examples and exercises that show you exactly how to leverage dictionaries to build smarter, more flexible, and scalable automation scripts.

Don’t just read the code; try it out. All snippets in this post are designed for simple hands-on practice so you can become fluent with dictionaries in real-world network engineering scenarios.

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