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NetBox: a source of truth for everything on your network
- sea-gold 3y agoI haven't had a chance to play with this, but it looks really cool (and is actively developed).
- Octabrain 3y agoI've never used it although I've been aware of its existence for a long time. It's great to see a tool actively developed that uses a boring-yet-great-and-well-known framework (Django + Templates). Ironically, it's refreshing to see that stack in a world of JS frameworks, microservices and what not.
- maxboone 3y agoIt's frontend uses a JS framework though [1], and transpiles it to the static directory. It's HTMX though, which is refreshing to see. [1] https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/tree/develop/netbox/project-static https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/tree/develop/netb...
- jonpurdy 3y agoI actually used this when it first came out in 2016; it was developed by a DevOps person at DigitalOcean as a hobby project (IIRC). My use at work was just a subset of features (IP and hostname), but I ended up using its Postgres DB as a source for SSH key deployment scripts (these days (maybe back then too) much easier to do with Ansible). Glad to see it's still actively developed and has a ton of features, yet seems to still be great at its core features!
- 000ooo000 3y agoIn case you were struggling to find anything meaningful on the site regarding what netbox actually is: >NetBox is the leading solution for modeling and documenting modern networks. By combining the traditional disciplines of IP address management (IPAM) and datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM) with powerful APIs and extensions, NetBox provides the ideal "source of truth" to power network automation.
- jethro_tell 3y agoThere are a lot of DCIMs out there, where netbox really shines, is that it's got a decent API and is pretty flexible. We use it as a front end for managing physical datacenters with a host of services that take or store their state in netbox. Services check boot targets, hosttypes, connected switch and power ports, the service and role a host will or does provide, lifecycle tracking, etc . . . And, we can give it to our physical datacenter techs and they just set the fields and boot the host. It's a really nice way to manage a front end, because netbox handles things like ldap and UI and we just write services that make the datacenter look like netbox.
- NewJazz 3y agoMy company went with opendcim over netbox a few years back and filled in the gaps with a custom database and app. We are now migrating a lot of our data into netbox and wondering why we didn't do that in the first place.
- jesperwe 3y ago"The site" is actually just their blog. The github repo at https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox is more like the real homepage and has a good presentation.
- HeckFeck 3y agoOh. A pity. In my head it would’ve been something like a poor man’s SIEM, monitoring traffic and keeping track of who has been accessing what on my home network. Hence, a source of truth. The mysterious machinations of the modern datagram hailstorm quantified and exposed.
- cloudpimp 3y agoWe use wazuh for this (and netbox tags to track which hosts have wazuh agents managed by ansible or other means).
- whalesalad 3y agogh repo is a bit better on details, and has screenshots: https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox There is a demo instance here: https://demo.netbox.dev/ https://demo.netbox.dev/
- tw04 3y agoI struggle with netbox. I understand their theory of separation of duties, but without it doing DDI and without it having native integration into all the major dns players the usefulness is questionable to me. Relying on people to always update the source of truth never actually works in practice in an organization of any size.
- SteveNuts 3y agoThere are Ansible and Terraform modules, the source of truth should be kept up to date by your automation. There are also reports you can write to catch any data issues.
- tw04 3y agoI fundamentally disagree. The source of truth should be naively updating my components, not a script that may or may not break with the next update which has 0 support available. Given the repeated asks on the GitHub issues, I’m confident I’m not alone in that belief. Infoblox doesn’t tell me to write a terraform script to update AD/dns and vice versa, they built it into the product.
- SteveNuts 3y agoNetbox isn't really a DHCP/DNS server and doesn't claim to be. You don't have to use its IPAM features if you want to use Infoblox instead. Netbox has a lot of great features for documenting your infrastructure even if you don't use IPAM - which Infoblox does not do at all.
- lukevp 3y agoAny comparison to PhpIPAM? That’s the only other open source IPAM I’ve used. Does this support scanning the networks as well?
- samcat116 3y agoIt doesn't, but its significantly more actively developed than PhpIPAM. There are also scanning plugins you can add.
- gertrunde 3y agoIt has quite a different focus than phpipam, which is mostly focused on IP addresses and related information, whereas netbox covers a wider range of items. The main area where they don't overlap is documenting physical equipment in racks, with which you can use to do some quite useful things. e.g. document every cable connection, so it can draw the full path from one interface to a switchport through multiple layers of structure cabling/patch panels, and associate an IP address with a specific physical interface on a specific device. Or track power draw on PSUs, and track that back to the relevant PDU/power feed to ensure it's within permitted power levels. Needless to say, using all features can be quite time consuming!
- samcat116 3y agoCan't say enough good things about Netbox. Really solid project.
- candiddevmike 3y agoPrior to NetBox I spent quite a bit time with RackTables. It was mostly manual documentation but really tickled my OCD itch (lovingly referred to as CrackTables), and it was really simple to use. https://www.racktables.org/ https://www.racktables.org/
- xwowsersx 3y agoLinking to docs since I could not tell what this was from the linked page https://docs.netbox.dev/en/stable/ https://docs.netbox.dev/en/stable/
- twiclo 3y agoI'm intimately familiar with Netbox. It has been the backbone of our WISP for going on 6 years. I just finished a long project where I had to do the first update to it in 5 years (a problem I inherited) and while it was painful to get everything ready on our end, I couldn't be happier with Netbox's side of things. The maintainers were able to easily answer questions on database design from 5 years ago. Great guys, great software.
- chpwssn 3y agoMy group has been running netbox for a few months now and it's been useful for keeping track of departmental address allocations and half a dozen racks of equipment. One note we've learned though: either host it offsite or set up an access point/laptop that you know will let you access it during a local outage.
- this_xor_that 3y agoMy org switched over to the Nautobot fork for the long term support aspect and integration with our other enterprise apps, both products are pretty great. EDIT: should note we are using the on-prem version, not cloud/SaaS.
- maxboone 3y agoGreat tool, moved our IPAM to it at a major hosting company in the Netherlands a couple years ago. Used a replicated PostgreSQL database and a Redis cluster (we went for KeyDB for HA) backing it and it's HA.
- klysm 3y agoIs it valid to just use IaC as the source of truth? That's where I do all my IPAM
- FL410 3y agoNetBox is awesome, super powerful. I'm also really excited about the recently (like last week) added IPAM/Rack management in Hudu (kind of like IT Glue). It's pretty rudimentary but they seem to iterate quickly and that will be a great option for people who do IPAM/rack documentation for many customers.
- jeffg-nbl 3y agoHey, I'm a product manager at NetBox Labs, the commercial stewards of the NetBox project. It's great to see such nice and useful feedback. We're not even a year old yet as a company, and we know that it's currently not easy to find details on netbox.dev, and we're in the middle of a project to address that. In the meantime, I hope you'll check out the resources hosted on https://netboxlabs.com https://netboxlabs.com. There's also a slack workspace at https://netdev-community.slack.com/ https://netdev-community.slack.com/ where you can interact with me and my colleagues. I'm @Jeff Gehlbach.
- frellus 3y agoSomehow I had no idea that there was a commercial SaaS version of Netbox, as I've been using the OSS version for years hosted internally. Feedback: the pricing is completely whacked, IMHO. I got excited that I could move to someone else supporting Netbox instead of my team, however due to the number of devices I have, I would have to use the middle license tier -- that's listed as $20,000/yr. This isn't a $20,000/yr problem to me, it would be impossible to justify this to my management, sadly. Just my feedback on your pricing. Netbox itself, the code and the absolutely stunning dev velocity is inspiring, but unless pricing were drastically lower I couldn't go for it. Would otherwise love to support.
- jeffg-nbl 3y agoThanks for the kind words! I'm specifically attached to NetBox Open Source, and will pass along the compliments to the dev team. And yeah, the pricing for NetBox Cloud isn't a fit for every use case. That product isn't the only thing we've got cooking; stay tuned :)
- snerbles 3y agoThat's comparable to Device42 and Sunbird - what you're really paying for is "one throat to choke". In an enterprise environment, that's pennies. In prior roles I've seen NetBox explicitly vetoed in favor of technically inferior solutions because there was no available support contract at the time. Also, Sunbird has fancy 3D rack renders, and that's management catnip.
- 3y ago
- etc-hosts 3y agoHow does this compare to Infoblox?
- karolist 3y agoit's free but you don't get consultants visiting you and taking your team for drinks so there's that
- hash07e 3y agoI would love some screenshots
- mrmrcoleman 3y agoYou can peruse the demo instance here: https://netbox-demo.netboxlabs.com/ https://netbox-demo.netboxlabs.com/ admin:admin
- oriettaxx 3y agoIs netbox intended to be some kind of "source of truth"? I mean, if MyVM has today IP: 10.10.10.200, and tomorrow somebody change that IP, * should I expect Netbox to change the IP assigned to MyVM? Does Netbox do some kind of auto-discovery? or that's not its role? Can Netbox ping my VM to know if they are UP, or that's not its role?
- jeffg-nbl 3y agoNetBox is indeed intended as a source of truth. It it tightly focused on being the very best DCIM + IPAM solution it can be, which means that discovery / reconciliation and assurance / monitoring are not a problem we're currently trying to solve. Other products do those things well, and can integrate with NetBox via our extensibility facilities including API, plugins, and scripts. In fact, we just announced partnerships with a couple of vendors that do those very things: https://netboxlabs.com/news/strategic-partnerships-reduce-adoption-barriers-for-network-automation/ https://netboxlabs.com/news/strategic-partnerships-reduce-ad...
- oriettaxx 3y agook, very good, thanks. So, (sorry I probably should read the docs, and I will, but I'm pretty curious now) the day we implement it, we have to plan to add all our data by hand, am I right? (IP, subnets, details on routes/routers, switches, login URI, notes, locations, ecc ecc..)
- 3y ago
- cwk9 3y agoNetbox is amazing. I'm never going back to spreadsheets and Visio.
- jethro_tell 3y agoMan, there are so many dots along the pathway between spreadheets and netbox. You make it sounds as if it's the only DCIM ever made.
- borlox 3y agoGreat tool, we‘re heavily relying on it for our network automation and have some custom plugins running.
- dang 3y agoRelated: NetBox: Infrastructure resource modeling application for network automation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264828 - Aug 2021 (11 comments) NetBox – DigitalOcean's IPAM and DCIM tool – open sourced - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11986828 - June 2016 (4 comments)
- jsz0 3y agoBig fan of NetBox I'm not even sure how I'd manage modern infrastructures without it. Unless your environment happens to be very static it's a huge time sink to document a network using old fashion Visio diagrams. The initial setup of NetBox can be quite an undertaking though. As long as you secure them properly CDP/LLDP/etc make the process much easier. One general rule of advice make sure you keep good backups of your NetBox because it's easy to make changes with unintended consequences that take a lot of time to manually back out
- jodrellblank 3y ago> "The initial setup of NetBox can be quite an undertaking though. As long as you secure them properly CDP/LLDP/etc make the process much easier." You may have good reasons, but I'll note for other readers that the NetBox documentation takes a position against doing that: > "Serve as a "Source of Truth" - NetBox intends to represent the desired state of a network versus its operational state. As such, automated import of live network state is strongly discouraged. All data created in NetBox should first be vetted by a human to ensure its integrity. NetBox can then be used to populate monitoring and provisioning systems with a high degree of confidence." - https://docs.netbox.dev/en/stable/introduction/ https://docs.netbox.dev/en/stable/introduction/ and > "ultimately the onus falls to a human operator to assert what is correct and what is not. For example, NetBox can validate the connection of a cable between two interfaces, but it cannot say whether the cable should be there." - https://docs.netbox.dev/en/stable/getting-started/planning/ https://docs.netbox.dev/en/stable/getting-started/planning/ Monitoring systems reflect the way your network is; ideally NetBox holds the admin side of the way your network should be - from your contracts, services, business agreements - and if the real state differs, you bring the real state into line with NetBox.
- gjvc 3y agofor the love of god please vote for this missing feature https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/issues/11721 https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/issues/11721 and save me from having to use nautobot instead, (which might actually be better long-run, hm)
- Already__Taken 3y agoIs there a neat netbox > dhcp allow & dns/reverse loop config I can setup? How do you even do that in ipv6 and netbox IPAM?
- kristjank 3y agoNetbox saved me a lot of headaches when managing clients. Turns out, it's a good idea to keep a network-only management tool that is manually updated, it fixes a lot of stability issues with other client management software, even if ti has an IPAM module