Earlier this year, we announced Diode, a new data ingestion service for NetBox that streamlines the process of ingesting and reconciling large amounts of data into NetBox’s data models. Diode has had a strong response from the community, and the Diode project transitioned into Public Preview a few months ago. We’ve released several related projects like the Diode Python and Go SDKs, and Diode Agent, a simple device discovery tool built atop Diode (see it in action here). We’ve continued to iterate on Diode based on the use cases and feedback of the NetBox community, and today we’re excited to share some recent enhancements to Diode, which remains in Public Preview.
Support for NetBox Virtualization Object Models
Diode has been extended to support ingestion of object models from NetBox’s Virtualization modeling. Now, you can use the Diode SDKs to easily build tools or integrations that ingest the following models into NetBox (check out the links for docs and examples):
Improving Usability and Troubleshooting
Some simple but valuable additions have been made to the Diode plugin for NetBox, which is part of every Diode setup. You can now manage settings for how Diode interacts with NetBox, including managing the URL target for Diode along with viewing configured API keys for Diode.
One of the key pieces of feedback we’ve heard from teams starting to integrate Diode into their NetBox stacks is the need for visibility of exactly what Diode is doing when it’s ingesting data into NetBox. What data has been ingested? Were there any failures ingesting and reconciling data, and if so why? Now, you can access all the details of Diode’s ingestion right in the NetBox UI with Diode’s new tool for reviewing and digging into ingestion logs, including viewing inbound data, the status of Diode’s reconciliation efforts, change sets that were generated by Diode, and any errors encountered during ingestion. Let’s take a look. Here’s the main ingestion log dashboard which provides a visual overview of Diode’s ingestion runs:
You can also drill into granular detail for every action taken by Diode, regardless of whether it resulted in changes to the NetBox data model, including viewing the raw inbound data in the same context as the resulting set of changes to objects in NetBox:
What’s Next for Diode
The NetBox Labs team continues to work hard on Diode and related tools – streamlining and simplifying the process of getting data into NetBox is always one of our priorities. We’ll have more exciting announcements about Diode and related tools later this year. Meanwhile, all the new Diode enhancements are available to everyone in the community today: check out the Diode GitHub project to get started!