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Announcing the NetBox 4.4 Beta

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4 min
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Richard Boucher
Announcing the NetBox 4.4 Beta
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The mid-August beta of NetBox v4.4 is here, offering a broad collection of improvements that directly address the daily workflows of network operations teams. NetBox 4.4 focuses on refining and polishing the user experience to make NetBox more intuitive and powerful for everyday use.

This release represents months of community feedback translated into practical enhancements. From improving bulk operations performance to enhancing job logging capabilities, NetBox 4.4 focuses on operational efficiency and workflow improvements. Additionally, several core infrastructure improvements in this release lay the groundwork for exciting developments in the NetBox ecosystem, including upcoming NetBox Custom Objects improvements.

What’s New in NetBox v4.4 Beta?

Here’s a quick look at some of the most significant new features in this beta release:

Enhanced Bulk Operations: Better Performance and Flexibility

NetBox 4.4 introduces significant improvements to bulk operations that make managing large-scale changes more efficient and user-friendly. Bulk imports can now be run as background jobs (#19589), allowing you to initiate large data imports without keeping your browser session active while they complete. Similarly, bulk edit and bulk delete operations can now execute in the background (#19891), providing better performance and allowing you to continue working while complex operations process. Additionally, a new bulk rename capability (#19231) has been added across all relevant models, streamlining the process of updating naming conventions at scale.

Advanced Job Logging: Better Visibility into Operations

A dedicated logging mechanism (#19816) has been introduced for jobs, providing persistent, structured logging that’s separate from job data. This new system includes granular log levels (debug, info, warning, error, critical) and timestamps, making it much easier to troubleshoot automation workflows and understand what happened during complex operations. This foundation enables better monitoring and debugging of background processes, whether they’re bulk operations, custom scripts, or plugin-driven automation tasks.

Platform and Hardware Management Improvements

NetBox 4.4 addresses several long-standing requests for better improved modeling. Platforms can now share the same name across different manufacturers (#17413), eliminating naming conflicts when working with multi-vendor environments. Interface transmit power fields now support negative values (#19134), providing more accurate representation of optical interface characteristics, particularly for short reach optics.

The release also includes improvements to image attachments with support for descriptions (#18990), plus a redesigned interface section (#18204) that makes managing device documentation more intuitive.

API and System Enhancements

Several improvements enhance NetBox’s API capabilities and system integration. The Object Types REST API endpoint has been extended to provide additional details (#19722) and moved to the “core” app (#19829) for better organization. The system now reports the hostname in the /api/status/ endpoint (#19893), improving monitoring and identification capabilities.

Enhanced Prometheus metrics now include REST and GraphQL API statistics (#19965), providing better visibility into NetBox usage patterns and performance characteristics.

User comments on change log entries

Users can now add comments to changelog entries, (#19713) providing better audit trails and documentation of why changes were made.

User Experience Refinements

Users can now set preferences for CSV delimiters (#19739), making data export and import workflows more flexible. Additional improvements include a customizable hostname setting (#18528), which should be especially helpful when running under docker where the hostname is shown as the docker container ID.

NetBox Custom Objects v0.2.0 Beta: No-Code Data Model Extension

Alongside the NetBox 4.4 beta, we’re also excited to announce the upcoming beta release of NetBox Custom Objects v0.2.0, which leverages the core infrastructure improvements in this release to bridge the gap between simple custom fields and complex plugin development by offering much of the power of plugins with the ease of use of tags and custom fields. Whether you’re modeling multicast services, application dependencies, or exotic technology stacks, Custom Objects enables you to create new object types in NetBox without writing a single line of code.

Get Involved

This release also includes a number of additional enhancements, improvements, and bug fixes beyond what we’ve highlighted here. For a comprehensive overview and detailed information on all updates and upgrade considerations, please refer to the full release notes.

The NetBox v4.4 beta is ready for you to explore. While we don’t recommend running beta releases in production, your participation in testing is crucial for the ongoing improvement of NetBox.

To get started:

Your feedback makes NetBox better! Please share your experience, report issues, and suggest improvements through our GitHub discussions or join us in the NetBox Slack community.

The NetBox 4.4 release represents our continued commitment to making network infrastructure management more intuitive, powerful, and scalable. We can’t wait to see how these enhancements help your team streamline their network operations.

Happy testing!