Question

You are building a FastMCP server that exposes a get_interface_status tool so an LLM agent can reason about interface health across IOS-XE devices. Currently the tool runs 'show interfaces' via Netmiko and returns the raw multi-line CLI text directly to the agent. During testing, the agent frequently misreads counters and confuses interface names when answering questions. Which change to the tool's implementation will most improve the reliability of the agent's responses?

Accepted Answer

Parse the CLI output with an ntc-templates/pyATS parser and return a structured JSON object of interfaces with typed fields such as name, oper_status, and error counters

Answer

Increase the Netmiko read timeout so the full CLI output is always captured before returning it to the agent

Answer

Prefix the raw CLI text with a longer natural-language description telling the agent how to read 'show interfaces' output

Answer

Return the raw CLI text but lower the LLM temperature so the agent is more deterministic when parsing it