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Data Center Management with NetBox

Staying on Top of Things

In many organizations, network information still gathers dust in Excel files: IP address ranges, virtual local area network (VLAN) names, switch ports – everything might be neatly listed, but the list only remains consistent until someone forgets to update a cell. On top of that, hardly anyone fully documents physical devices, cabling, or virtual networks. This house of cards collapses – at the very latest – when multiple admins need to work on the infrastructure at the same time. As complexity grows (virtualization, cloud, containers, automation), the spreadsheets reach their limits, and it is a pain to have to click through various tools or pore over old notes just because someone wants to know which virtual machine (VM) is on which subnet or which ports are still free and on which switches.

NetBox [1] enters the game at exactly this point. This open source project by Jeremy Stretch, originally developed at DigitalOcean, was intended from the outset as a source of truth (i.e., a central, trusted database for all infrastructure information). Instead of outdated spreadsheets, NetBox manages your entire network and data center documentation in a consistent, logically linked model. The idea is as simple as it is powerful: Infrastructure is no longer described in disparate files, but by data objects with relationships. An IP address belongs to an interface, the interface to a device, the device to a rack, and the rack to a site. The whole system integrates seamlessly with tools such as Ansible or Terraform.

A Unified Database

The NetBox open source platform records your physical and virtual infrastructure in a unified database – from racks and devices, to networks, through IP address spaces, to VMs. It was developed in Python with Django; PostgreSQL is the database, and Redis is the cache. The entire system can be run in the