NetBox Labs is expanding its network management platform this week with a pair of new products designed to tackle the growing challenges of infrastructure documentation and configuration management.
NetBox Labs is the lead commercial sponsor behind the widely deployed open source NetBox technology, which is used for modeling and documenting networks. The company was spun out of DNS platform provider NS1 in 2023. NS1 was subsequently acquired by IBM. NetBox Labs provides commercially supported services for NetBox including cloud and enterprise offerings.
The two new products, NetBox Assurance and NetBox Discovery, go beyond what the company has provided to date, with more capabilities to help better manage network infrastructure and reduce operational issues caused by configuration drift.
“NetBox is a source of truth for networks and infrastructure – the system of record for how your infrastructure is connected, configured, and the like – and is a data model for capturing the intended state of the infrastructure,” Kristopher Beevers, CEO of NetBox Labs, told Network World. “NetBox Discovery is an observability tool for gathering operational state, and NetBox Assurance enables operators to bring the operational state in line with the intended state and keep it that way.”
How discovery and assurance extend network automation
NetBox Discovery, the first of the two new products, addresses the fundamental challenge of network documentation by automatically gathering and ingesting network as well as infrastructure information into NetBox’s data model. The tool employs an agent-based approach with a zero-trust architecture, making it particularly suitable for organizations with segmented networks and strict security requirements.
Beevers explained that NetBox Discovery makes it easy for operators to do two things:
The second product, NetBox Assurance, takes on the challenge of operational drift by providing continuous monitoring and analysis of network configurations. Unlike traditional batch-processing tools, NetBox Assurance operates continuously to identify deviations from intended states and can trigger automated remediation actions.
“NetBox Assurance sits between NetBox Discovery or other discovery tools or data sources and NetBox itself,” Beevers said. “It’s at the nexus between the operational state of the infrastructure observed by NetBox Discovery and the intended state as modeled in NetBox.”
NetBox Discovery takes a different approach to network discovery
The basic concept of network discovery is almost as old as networking itself, with countless solutions deployed over the decades. NetBox is aiming to take a differentiated approach.
Beevers noted that NetBoxDiscovery uses an agent-based architecture, which has advantages over discovery solutions that are monolithic. He explained that agents mean the discovery problem can be divided across many agents. For example, agents placed in each network segment or across a distributed footprint can enable discovery where monolithic solutions don’t work. He added that agents can fan out for scale and performance in large environments to speed up discovery.
“With many agents comes a need for orchestration,” Beevers said. “NetBox Discovery agents connect with a zero-trust architecture up to a control plane for orchestration that can be in the cloud, or self-hosted, enabling this architecture without needing to reconfigure firewalls or similar.”
Also of note is that NetBox works for on-premises, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Beevers expects that over time, the new Discovery and Assurance technologies will extend across all those environments as well.
“NetBox is widely used to document, model and automate hybrid cloud footprints,” Beevers said. “Hybrid and multi-cloud trends are a huge driver of NetBox adoption given the need in these environments for cloud- and vendor-agnostic management and automation tooling.”
Both NetBox Discovery and Assurance are currently in early preview. The source code for NetBox Discovery will be made available to the community, though Beevers said there may be some additional features NetBox Labs delivers commercially over time. NetBox Assurance will be proprietary only.
Source:: Network World