NetBox Labs this week made available a new product that will help network teams detect and remediate configuration drift across sophisticated network environments before costly service disruptions or unplanned downtime affect services or applications.
NetBox Assurance addresses a critical pain point for IT teams: the growing gap between how networks are supposed to look and how they actually operate. By providing real-time monitoring and automated drift detection, NetBox Assurance aims to transform network management from a reactive to a proactive discipline.
“Networks are becoming more complicated, more critical, and the teams managing them aren’t growing at the same rate as the complexity, criticality, and dynamicism of these networks,” says Kristopher Beevers, CEO of NetBox Labs. “Our goal is to give these teams the tools to maintain network integrity and drive intelligent automation.”
NetBox Labs is the primary commercial sponsor behind the widely used open-source NetBox technology, which is often used for modeling, documenting, and architecting networks. NetBox Labs was founded in 2023 after being spun out of DNS platform provider NS1 in 2023. Following IBM’s acquisition of NS1, Beevers says he noticed how many customers were using the open-source NetBox in their operations, which led him to found NetBox Labs and address the growing need for better network documentation and automation tools.
Beevers explains that network intent is the documented description of how a network should look, function, and be configured. He describes NetBox as the place where organizations document: what is on the network, how network components are connected, how components should be configured, and how the network should operate. The goal is to create a clear, documented blueprint of the network’s intended state, which can then be used as a reference point for automation, configuration management, and detecting deviations from the original plan. He says in this age of AI and generative AI, clear network intent is the first step in network automation.
NetBox Assurance continuously compares a network’s intended configuration with its actual operational state, automatically detecting and helping organizations fix configuration discrepancies in near real-time. Configuration drift can happen for many reasons ranging from human error to automated systems making conflicting configuration challenges.
“We want to make it easier to build and manage complex networks, and some of that is taking away a lot of the busy work. The skill set of the network engineer is going to evolve quite a bit, making it possible for network engineers to worry less about the tactical details and the busy work and more on architecture and orchestration and decision making,” Beevers says.
Network operations professionals face significant challenges with configuration drift, says Shamus McGillicuddy, research director for the network management practice at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), and “many companies try to build automation for config compliance to deal with it.” Still, spotting drift is a difficult challenge, especially for large, multi-vendor networks.
“NetBox Labs is offering an enterprise-grade approach to config compliance with its Assurance capability. It discovers actual configs in the field, reports on which production configs are out of compliance with the NetBox model and provides workflows to plan for mitigation of those config drifts,” McGillicuddy says. Assurance could help with enterprise organizations looking to deploy more automation in their environments, he says, because it provides better visibility into network changes. The type of tool could also drive other efficiencies.
“First, it eliminates a lot of manual toil for engineers who are tasked with remediating config drift. Second, it potentially replaces some custom automation tooling that can be time-consuming to maintain,” McGillicuddy says.
NetBox Assurance is delivered through NetBox Enterprise or NetBox Cloud, with NetBox Cloud being the more popular commercial offering. Assurance is a commercial product that requires either the enterprise or cloud platform to work, and it is not available via NetBox’s open-source version. The enterprise version is an on-premises offering, and the cloud version provides a fully managed solution.
NetBox Assurance is available now.
Source:: Network World