Also of note, the project documentation has been completed overhauled for this release, and now includes an in-depth features overview, a handy “getting started” guide, and detailed data model documentation. Check it out now on ReadTheDocs!
And as always, a huge thank you to our community members who helped test out the beta releases. Your suggestions and bug reports have helped immensely as NetBox continues to grow and expand its feature set.
The second beta release for NetBox v3.3 is now available! Check out the release notes for a list of changes from the first beta release, and everything new coming in v3.3.
As with every beta release, this is not suitable for production use. It is intended for evaluation and testing only. (We hope to have the final v3.3.0 release ready in a couple weeks.)
You’re also welcome to try our public demo instance, which gets rebuilt nightly from the project’s feature branch. Let us know what you think!
…and lots more! Check out the beta release notes for a complete list of improvements.
Bear in mind that, being a beta release, this is not yet suitable for production use. However, you are more than welcome to help us test it for final release. We even have a public demo instance available at beta-demo.netbox.dev. Your feedback during this evaluation period will help to ensure a smooth final release for version 3.3, which we expect to make available in mid-August.
NetBox v3.2.0 is now available on GitHub! This is a huge release representing several months of intense development effort. Major new features include:
Automatic Provisioning of Next Available VLANs (#2658)
There’s a ton more still to cover, so be sure to read through the full v3.2 release notes before upgrading. And if you haven’t already, check out our migration scripts to help replicate data out of the legacy ASN and contact fields on the site model.
And if you’re interested in leveraging the newly improved plugins framework, be sure to follow the plugins development tutorial for a step-by-step introduction to the development process. You’ll be up and running with your own custom plugins in no time!
The second beta release of NetBox v3.2 is now available! This release fixes several bugs found in the first beta, and continues extending and refining the plugins framework. You can install it locally, or try out our public demo at beta-demo.netbox.dev! (If you happen to run into any problems while testing the beta release, please be sure to open a GitHub issue to let us know.)
We’re making excellent progress toward the final v3.2.0 release, which is planned for the week of April 4th. Stay tuned!
The first beta release of NetBox v3.2 is now available! This release debuts a ton of exciting new features, including:
Device modules & module types
Object and multi-object custom fields
Customizable status choices
Improved user preferences
Inventory item roles & templates
Service templates
Automatic provisioning of available VLANs
This release also greatly extends NetBox’s plugins framework, introducing formal support for myriad model, view, form, table, and other components. These will greatly simplify the process of plugin development and minimize the duplication of boilerplate code in plugins. You can find a complete accounting of the new plugins framework in the beta documentation.
As with previous beta releases, we’ve spun up a public demo instance at beta-demo.netbox.dev for the community to help evaluate the new features and submit any bug reports or suggestions. Of course, you’re also encouraged to download and deploy the beta release locally, especially if you’d like to experiment with the new plugins framework.
The final release of v3.2.0 is scheduled for early April, so now is the time to try it out and let us know what you think!
One of the challenges that comes with developing open source software is getting reliable and detailed bug reports from users in the wild. Because NetBox is generally self-hosted and has no phone-home function, we don’t have any direct access to deployments other than what we (the maintainers) deploy ourselves. But there’s a new feature in NetBox v3.2.3 that I think can really help us out: Sentry intgeration.
Enabling error reporting via Sentry allows us to collect and analyze exceptions and other errors as they happen, rather than having to wait for bug reports submitted by end users. It won’t capture all bugs, of course, but it will alert us to the more severe issues. Sentry reports include a full stack trace, which is often needed to determine just where a bug exists, but no end user-identifiable information or confidential data.
To enable Sentry integration, simply turn on the SENTRY_ENABLED configuration parameter and restart NetBox:
SENTRY_ENABLED=True
NetBox will begin generating error reports and sending them to our centralized ingestor. One of the biggest benefits of this community-powered arrangement is that we’ll be able to correlate bugs by software release, operating system, and other deployment attributes.
Of course, it’s possible to use your own Sentry ingestor too: You’ll just need to define your custom DSN:
Itential has announced an upcoming webinar on Tuesday, August 30th at 12pm EDT (4pm UTC). Along with our own Jordan Villarreal, Technical Advocate for NetBox at NS1, they’ll showcase integration with the NetBox API and the creation of automated workflows to facilitate the trasnfer of data between NetBox and other systems.
By coupling Data Transformations along with API integration, Itential can help network teams build a bridge that translates data between multiple IT systems, like NetBox and ServiceNow, inside a network automation. These features will enable the network team to spend less time manually accessing data from different applications and reduce the potential of inputting bad data due to human error.
Specfically, they’ll be building a data transformation to synchronize data between NetBox and ServiceNow, a hugely popular topic in the community.
In this demo, you will learn to:
Understand the NetBox API structure.
Build an Itential automation workflow to utilize NetBox API calls.
Automate IP address reservation, queries, and updates.
Build a Data Transformation between NetBox and ServiceNow.
Are you a NetBox power user? Maybe you’ve even built a plugin or custom script? Would you like to be more involved in feature development and roadmap planning for NetBox? To better enable community members like you to have a direct impact on NetBox’s development, today we’re launching the NetBox Advocates Program!
What does it mean to be a NetBox advocate?
We’ll occasionally reach out (via email) for feedback on specific new or planned NetBox features. For example, we may ask for feedback on the plugins development experience, or which of several potential new features you’d prefer to see first. This feedback will help guide NetBox’s long-term development.
You may be offered access to pre-release instances of NetBox or other tools for evaluation and feedback.
You’ll be able to leverage our community Sentry service for error reporting and correlation. We’ll proactively reach out to advocates who opt to enable this service regarding any new errors we detect. We may ask if you can assist with reproducing the error to help develop a fix, or point you to a potential fix.
Your organization’s logo will optionally be published in our list of advocates.
And this is just the beginning! We fully expect the importance of the advocates program to grow as the NetBox ecosystem continues to expand.
We had an amazing turnout for this year’s NetBox community survey, with 487 total responses. Thank you very much to everyone who took the time to participate! The data generated will help inform our roadmap for the rest of 2022 and beyond.
A detailed analysis of the results has been posted over on GitHub, so check it out if you’d like to learn more about the organizations that use NetBox and what they want to see.
Our 2022 NetBox community survey is now open! This annual questionnaire solicits feedback and demographic data from NetBox users around the world, which the maintainers use to shape the project’s long-term development.
The survey will be open throughout March, and the results will be published in early April. Please take a few minutes to share your experience with NetBox!
Itential has announced an upcoming webinar on Tuesday, August 30th at 12pm EDT (4pm UTC). Along with our own Jordan Villarreal, Technical Advocate for NetBox at NS1, they’ll showcase integration with the NetBox API and the creation of automated workflows to facilitate the trasnfer of data between NetBox and other systems.
By coupling Data Transformations along with API integration, Itential can help network teams build a bridge that translates data between multiple IT systems, like NetBox and ServiceNow, inside a network automation. These features will enable the network team to spend less time manually accessing data from different applications and reduce the potential of inputting bad data due to human error.
Specfically, they’ll be building a data transformation to synchronize data between NetBox and ServiceNow, a hugely popular topic in the community.
In this demo, you will learn to:
Understand the NetBox API structure.
Build an Itential automation workflow to utilize NetBox API calls.
Automate IP address reservation, queries, and updates.
Build a Data Transformation between NetBox and ServiceNow.
You’ve taken the leap and started automating your network – but it’s time to move past writing single-use scripts that have hardcoded values in them. Are you still storing your credentials in a file or passing them via environment variables? Is the inventory of devices stored in a YAML file? If so, it’s time to embrace Sources of Truth! In this session, participants will use REST APIs to securely store and access secrets using HashiCorp Vault and then manage network device inventory using NetBox. Once the sources of truth are configured, we will use this data to configure a network topology. Move away from text files and take your automation skills to the next level!
The 45-minute session (dubbed DEVWKS-2295) will be presented by Palmer Sample and Juulia Santala, and has an “intermediate” technical level rating. Sounds like fun!
There is now a complete plugin development tutorial for NetBox v3.2! This detailed guide walks through the entire process of creating a custom plugin for managing simple access lists in NetBox.
The guide is arranged into ten consecutive sections, each of which focuses on a major component of NetBox’s plugins framework. It also includes a companion repo which contains a snapshot of the completed code at each step. This allows readers to easily pick up from any step and focus on a particular subject.
Although NetBox v3.2.0 is still a couple weeks away (scheduled for release the week of Aptril 4th), we don’t anticipate any more major changes to the new plugins framework. You can get started with plugin development right now using the most recent beta release!. The guide will be updated over time as future NetBox releases continue to expand the plugins framework.
The second beta release of NetBox v3.2 is now available! This release fixes several bugs found in the first beta, and continues extending and refining the plugins framework. You can install it locally, or try out our public demo at beta-demo.netbox.dev! (If you happen to run into any problems while testing the beta release, please be sure to open a GitHub issue to let us know.)
We’re making excellent progress toward the final v3.2.0 release, which is planned for the week of April 4th. Stay tuned!
The first beta release of NetBox v3.2 is now available! This release debuts a ton of exciting new features, including:
Device modules & module types
Object and multi-object custom fields
Customizable status choices
Improved user preferences
Inventory item roles & templates
Service templates
Automatic provisioning of available VLANs
This release also greatly extends NetBox’s plugins framework, introducing formal support for myriad model, view, form, table, and other components. These will greatly simplify the process of plugin development and minimize the duplication of boilerplate code in plugins. You can find a complete accounting of the new plugins framework in the beta documentation.
As with previous beta releases, we’ve spun up a public demo instance at beta-demo.netbox.dev for the community to help evaluate the new features and submit any bug reports or suggestions. Of course, you’re also encouraged to download and deploy the beta release locally, especially if you’d like to experiment with the new plugins framework.
The final release of v3.2.0 is scheduled for early April, so now is the time to try it out and let us know what you think!
NetBox v3.1 introduced support for single-sign on (SSO) authentication when it was released back in December, using the popular python-social-auth library. This has been in high demand for quite some time as it enables NetBox administrators to offload authentication to an external service.
Jason Lavoie has just written an excellent tutorial on enabling Okta authentication for NetBox. He walks through the entire process from start to finish, covering configuration of both Okta and NetBox, even going so far as to include a Terraform configuration for Okta! It’s well worth a read if you’re looking to enable Okta authentication for NetBox.
I’ll be hosting another NetBox live coding session today at 6pm UTC / 1pm EST. These sessions run about an hour long, during which I try to knock out various feature requests and bug reports from GitHub, sharing my screen and narrating as I go. I also take relevant questions from the chat. This is a great way to get a “behind the scenes” look at NetBox development, and open source development in general.
With NetBox v3.2 due to be released next week, it’s worth taking a moment to evaluate your upgrade readiness. While there aren’t many major breaking changes in this release, there are two items you’ll definitely want to double-check:
The contact fields (name, phone, and email) are being removed from the site model
The ASN field is being removed from the site model
You may recall that Netbox v3.1 introduced a dedicated “Contact” model, which enables much more efficient and complex contact assignment, and obviates the need for storing contact information directly on individual sites. Likewise, v3.1 also introduced a designated model for autonomous system number (ASN) tracking, rendering the site model’s asn field obsolete.
To help expedite the upgrade process for organizations which still rely on data in any of these fields, we’ve published a set of migration scripts. These can be installed and run in your local NetBox instance to automatically replicate data from the legacy fields into the new models.
As with any such process, it is highly recommended to perform a database backup immediately prior to running these, and to perform a “dry run” (without commiting changes to the database) first as a sanity check. While the behavior of the scripts is likely suitable for most cases, users are also encouraged to modify these if necessary to better fit their exact preferences. For example, you might want to limit the sites being migrated by tag or role. (Be sure to check out NetBox’s custom script documentation too!)
With the relevant data safely migrated to the new models, you’ll be ready for NetBox v3.2!
NS1 is hiring a software to help develop our commercial NetBox Cloud product as well as the open source NetBox project. This candidate will work alongside myself and the rest of our NetBox team here at NS1, and will routinely engage with the NetBox maintainers and community. From the posting:
You will:
Help lead the development of NetBox Cloud’s roadmap.
Engage in product and roadmap planning discussions.
Contribute to documentation and supporting tooling for both the NetBox community and NS1’s NetBox offerings.
Work closely with NS1’s NetBox-focused SREs.
Support the open source NetBox project and assist in delivering its roadmap.
Seek new ways to deliver the best possible user experience for NetBox users.
Become an active member of the NetBox open source community.
Ideally, you’ll bring:
Proficiency in full stack Python development with a particular focus on development for web applications using Django
Solid experience with RESTful APIs and JSON
Experience in enterprise network architecture and operations
Prior engagement with NetBox as a user, operator, or open source contributor
Familiarity with software development best practices, including revision control and documentation
Excellent communication skills (written and verbal) and comfort engaging with prospective and current customers to collaborate and solve problems
Ability to perform well as part of a distributed team
Extra kudos for familiarity with:
Experience coaching junior software engineers
Open source software and engagement with open source development practices
Core network engineering concepts
One or more commercial DDI solutions
TypeScript development experience
Ansible, Salt, or similar configuration management software
Tools in the modern DevOps toolkit
Cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure)
This position is available for full-time remote work, to candidates in the US, UK, and Ireland. You can learn more about this role and apply on NS1’s careers site.
Are you a NetBox power user? Maybe you’ve even built a plugin or custom script? Would you like to be more involved in feature development and roadmap planning for NetBox? To better enable community members like you to have a direct impact on NetBox’s development, today we’re launching the NetBox Advocates Program!
What does it mean to be a NetBox advocate?
We’ll occasionally reach out (via email) for feedback on specific new or planned NetBox features. For example, we may ask for feedback on the plugins development experience, or which of several potential new features you’d prefer to see first. This feedback will help guide NetBox’s long-term development.
You may be offered access to pre-release instances of NetBox or other tools for evaluation and feedback.
You’ll be able to leverage our community Sentry service for error reporting and correlation. We’ll proactively reach out to advocates who opt to enable this service regarding any new errors we detect. We may ask if you can assist with reproducing the error to help develop a fix, or point you to a potential fix.
Your organization’s logo will optionally be published in our list of advocates.
And this is just the beginning! We fully expect the importance of the advocates program to grow as the NetBox ecosystem continues to expand.
Please note that all players have been anonymized to protect the guilty. Please also note that I have jumped ship several times during my formal IT education. You might see why.
I had just started my apprenticeship at this company—hardly past the three-month mark—when BigBoss told me I was to assist with the move of the company’s servers. About nine racks’ worth of equipment across the city, minimum downtime… you know the drill. I don’t at this point, but I think figuring out what equipment goes where and how it is connected is a good first step.
My direct superior helpfully points me to a folder on our network labeled “Server Documentation”. I see the file ending. These are Excel files. Uh oh.
A quick check reveals that not even half of our switches are in here. Somebody has attempted to visualise the whole deal by drawing rack outlines with the columns. It’s colourful and pretty, yet not a single cable is part of the documentation. It is a complete and utter mess.
I get back to my superior and he agrees that the situation is hardly ideal. I’m just getting known in the company for my research skills, so I’m tasked to find us software that will allow proper documentation of all racks and interfaces.
An hour later, I have identified the two best candidates. First I present my favourite: NetBox, which I knew from an earlier internship, has all the features we need, is self-hosted, and it’s open source!
“Open source?!” BigBoss laughs at that, “Open source software isn’t suitable for enterprise applications!”
“Okay, then we probably need to go with $EnterpriseSoftware, which is hard to administer and doesn’t have all the features we need, but at least it’s way over budget.”
He looks at the costs.
He looks at the capabilities.
He looks at the costs again.
“Do a presentation for the C-Suite. If you can convince them, I’m fine with it.”
Sure, apprentice, new software, C-Suite, software options that cost more than my salary in a year… no pressure!
In the end, the C-Suite wasn’t hard to convince; also, I love convincing people. They liked that NetBox is an off-the-shelf solution for our exact problem and didn’t seem too bothered by the fact that it was open source.
I would have loved to introduce them to the wonders of automation, in the form of the NetBox API, that would have done a lot of the heavy lifting in documenting the datacenter. But this is an old school kind of company, so the very Idea of automating something you could make apprentices do was frowned upon. Not like we had an approaching deadline or anything.
Next came a roll out in our testing environment, a couple “oohs” and “aahs” from my superiors, and a couple “I told you so”s I kept quietly in my head. They loved the multi-tenant option, allowing us to not only document our own racks, but also the customers’ racks, without any possibility of a mix-up.
I think the documentation is solid enough to be able to direct a helper on location (even if that helper is non-technical staff), enabling shorter turn-arounds for any disruptions occurring at remote sites, in turn saving money, time, and sanity of the employee who doesn’t have to drive out to some village.
Then we had to check every single connection by tugging a bit on the cables, taking care not to disconnect the productive environment, screaming over the racket of racks, and slowly untangling the organically grown infrastructure our predecessors had left us with. All told, we spend about 130 manhours just documenting the racks. Additionally, I spent twenty hours with a label printer, putting the UIDs NetBox had generated on the corresponding cables.
Being able to distinguish the kind, colour, length, transmission rate, and interfaces of every cable inside NetBox saved my life, or at the very least our deadline. If a future version could automate sitting on a server room floor and attaching tiny labels to hundreds of cables, I might just marry that version.
Armed with this shiny new documentation—our first single-point-of-truth—we even managed to plan ahead where to put equipment that was yet to be purchased. If the cabling was any indication, planning ahead was a first.
The fact that NetBox allows us to label devices throughout their lifecycle from “staging” to “decommissioning” brought another round of impressed “oohs” and “aahs” from my superior.
For the outsourced moving company, I printed A3 size posters with front and rear views of the racks they had to assemble. They also got binders with plans where each device had to go. I brought enough for everybody, and a couple more for us, documenting the cabling. NetBox even allows exporting everything to CSV files, which was amazing for setting up these binders.
Otherwise the move went almost flawlessly, and the included stress testing of NetBox was so convincing it’s now part of the portfolio at that company.
Seems like NetBox is indeed suited for enterprise applications.
In summary: NetBox did everything we wanted it to, passed our security audit, and has the potential to do so much more, with options to document IPs, VMs, and entire networks down to the providers.
By the end, my superior acknowledged that the move was pretty much my project more than his, so if a tool can do that for an apprentice three months in, imagine what it can do for you.
Please note that all players have been anonymized to protect the guilty. Please also note that I have jumped ship several times during my formal IT education. You might see why.
I had just started my apprenticeship at this company—hardly past the three-month mark—when BigBoss told me I was to assist with the move of the company’s servers. About nine racks’ worth of equipment across the city, minimum downtime… you know the drill. I don’t at this point, but I think figuring out what equipment goes where and how it is connected is a good first step.
My direct superior helpfully points me to a folder on our network labeled “Server Documentation”. I see the file ending. These are Excel files. Uh oh.
A quick check reveals that not even half of our switches are in here. Somebody has attempted to visualise the whole deal by drawing rack outlines with the columns. It’s colourful and pretty, yet not a single cable is part of the documentation. It is a complete and utter mess.
I get back to my superior and he agrees that the situation is hardly ideal. I’m just getting known in the company for my research skills, so I’m tasked to find us software that will allow proper documentation of all racks and interfaces.
An hour later, I have identified the two best candidates. First I present my favourite: NetBox, which I knew from an earlier internship, has all the features we need, is self-hosted, and it’s open source!
“Open source?!” BigBoss laughs at that, “Open source software isn’t suitable for enterprise applications!”
“Okay, then we probably need to go with $EnterpriseSoftware, which is hard to administer and doesn’t have all the features we need, but at least it’s way over budget.”
He looks at the costs.
He looks at the capabilities.
He looks at the costs again.
“Do a presentation for the C-Suite. If you can convince them, I’m fine with it.”
Sure, apprentice, new software, C-Suite, software options that cost more than my salary in a year… no pressure!
In the end, the C-Suite wasn’t hard to convince; also, I love convincing people. They liked that NetBox is an off-the-shelf solution for our exact problem and didn’t seem too bothered by the fact that it was open source.
I would have loved to introduce them to the wonders of automation, in the form of the NetBox API, that would have done a lot of the heavy lifting in documenting the datacenter. But this is an old school kind of company, so the very Idea of automating something you could make apprentices do was frowned upon. Not like we had an approaching deadline or anything.
Next came a roll out in our testing environment, a couple “oohs” and “aahs” from my superiors, and a couple “I told you so”s I kept quietly in my head. They loved the multi-tenant option, allowing us to not only document our own racks, but also the customers’ racks, without any possibility of a mix-up.
I think the documentation is solid enough to be able to direct a helper on location (even if that helper is non-technical staff), enabling shorter turn-arounds for any disruptions occurring at remote sites, in turn saving money, time, and sanity of the employee who doesn’t have to drive out to some village.
Then we had to check every single connection by tugging a bit on the cables, taking care not to disconnect the productive environment, screaming over the racket of racks, and slowly untangling the organically grown infrastructure our predecessors had left us with. All told, we spend about 130 manhours just documenting the racks. Additionally, I spent twenty hours with a label printer, putting the UIDs NetBox had generated on the corresponding cables.
Being able to distinguish the kind, colour, length, transmission rate, and interfaces of every cable inside NetBox saved my life, or at the very least our deadline. If a future version could automate sitting on a server room floor and attaching tiny labels to hundreds of cables, I might just marry that version.
Armed with this shiny new documentation—our first single-point-of-truth—we even managed to plan ahead where to put equipment that was yet to be purchased. If the cabling was any indication, planning ahead was a first.
The fact that NetBox allows us to label devices throughout their lifecycle from “staging” to “decommissioning” brought another round of impressed “oohs” and “aahs” from my superior.
For the outsourced moving company, I printed A3 size posters with front and rear views of the racks they had to assemble. They also got binders with plans where each device had to go. I brought enough for everybody, and a couple more for us, documenting the cabling. NetBox even allows exporting everything to CSV files, which was amazing for setting up these binders.
Otherwise the move went almost flawlessly, and the included stress testing of NetBox was so convincing it’s now part of the portfolio at that company.
Seems like NetBox is indeed suited for enterprise applications.
In summary: NetBox did everything we wanted it to, passed our security audit, and has the potential to do so much more, with options to document IPs, VMs, and entire networks down to the providers.
By the end, my superior acknowledged that the move was pretty much my project more than his, so if a tool can do that for an apprentice three months in, imagine what it can do for you.
