The individual scripts in Phase 4 each print their own report, but checking five different terminal outputs every time isn't a real operations workflow. This phase covers how those scripts were consolidated into a single HTML dashboard, in stages.
The first version was deliberately simple: one script connecting to the routers, pulling status/OSPF/compliance/backup/drift information, and rendering it as a plain HTML table.
As more checks were added, the single table grew into a proper "Network Operations Dashboard" page — a network overview summary, separate Router Summary and Switch Summary tables, and a collapsible Device Details section per device:
By this point, the project had split into four separate dashboard modules — a health/scoring dashboard, a device explorer with search, a compliance/OSPF/VLAN operations dashboard, and a backup/drift dashboard — each tested independently before being merged.
Rather than literally concatenating the four modules' code, the merge was done properly: connect to every device once, collect everything needed across all four modules into a single set of dictionaries, and generate one HTML page from that. This cut the total code size by roughly 40% compared to running all four scripts separately, and avoids reconnecting to the same device repeatedly.
Running the merged script connects to all five devices in one pass and writes a single dashboard file:
The resulting dashboard opens with live status cards (devices online, OSPF health, compliance, average health score) followed by the Router Summary table:
Below that, the Switch Summary, Compliance Dashboard, and OSPF Dashboard:
Then the VLAN Dashboard, Backup Dashboard (with backup history), and the Drift Detection viewer with expandable per-file diffs:
And finally a search box that filters the device list live, plus an expand/collapse-all Device Explorer with full interface, OSPF, VLAN, and running-config detail per device:
By the time the merge was finished, the platform covered: automated inventory collection, configuration backups, OSPF monitoring, compliance auditing, interface monitoring, VLAN deployment automation, configuration drift detection, and all of it surfaced through one unified HTML dashboard.
The next logical upgrades — not built as part of this version — would be a live Flask dashboard with auto-refresh instead of a static HTML snapshot, email/Slack alerting when compliance or OSPF checks fail, scheduled backups via cron/Task Scheduler, a topology visualization layer, Git-based configuration version control, and a small REST API in front of the collected data.