NetBox’s role as a network source of truth continues to evolve, and as our user community expands, so too does the desire for seamless integrations with other critical platforms. Today, we’re thrilled to announce the Private Preview of our latest integration which allows teams to easily keep data and policy synchronized between NetBox and Juniper Mist.
Juniper Mist’s popularity and robust capabilities have inspired many in the NetBox community to create their own integrations. Dartmouth College is just one example, and Lead Network Engineer Bryan Ward recently joined me on an episode of Network Automation Heroes to share their NetBox and Juniper Mist story. Dartmouth and many other users in the NetBox ecosystem have shown the power of combining NetBox and Juniper Mist and our new integration now opens up these capabilities to all NetBox Labs customers.
This new integration is an example of a “shared authority” model emerging in enterprise IT networks. In modern networks, there often isn’t a single source of truth. Instead, multiple authoritative systems must coexist and share data accurately and intuitively. Consider Mist managed wireless APs: they often appear in Juniper Mist first—arriving as new hardware, scanned in via QR code, then synced to NetBox. Conversely, some organizations may prefer defining sites in NetBox and pushing those definitions into Mist. Likewise, NetBox’s powerful config contexts can serve as the authority for radio settings, pushing them directly into Mist. The trick is to allow users to make changes in the appropriate systems, while still reflecting those updates across the network management stack. This new integration allows users to decide which data should be controlled by NetBox, and which data by Juniper Mist, allowing them to model the behaviour that matches their internal processes.
“It’s quite common to see organizations piecing together ‘good enough’ integrations for essential systems like NetBox and Juniper Mist,” says Steinn ‘Steinzi’ Örvar, lead product development engineer at Advania. “These integrations often become a maintenance burden for teams over time and lack critical functionality or updates. Seeing NetBox Labs rise to the occasion to provide this functionality for their customers will allow many teams to focus on their networks instead of maintaining yet another script or data pipeline.”
The NetBox Juniper Mist integration has been evolving in the NetBox Labs Experimental stage with focussed input from a handful of early users who’ve helped shape its initial direction. Now, by entering Private Preview, we’re inviting anyone who is interested in integrating NetBox with Juniper Mist to get in touch so we can expand our understanding of the requirements and extend the supported use cases as we progress towards Public Preview and eventual General Availability in early 2025.
This Juniper Mist integration follows on the heels of other integrations we’ve spotlighted, like our NetBox Proxmox integration announced by Nate Patwardhan last week, and our earlier work on the NetBox ServiceNow integration. This is all part of our “big tent” strategy: no matter what platforms power your network, we want NetBox to integrate seamlessly, making sure you can harmonize data and workflows across your tooling ecosystem.
“The way we build products at NetBox Labs is to start with the users, of which NetBox has no shortage”, says Kris Beevers, CEO at NetBox Labs. “This integration is another example of how quickly we move when we have a clear problem and focused end users who are motivated to work with us to solve it. This is a pattern you’ll see accelerating in 2025.”
If you’re using NetBox and Juniper Mist and would like to shape the future of the integration, we’d love to have you join the Private Preview. Please contact us at product@netboxlabs.com with your name, company, role, and a brief description of how a tighter integration between NetBox and Juniper Mist could advance your network operations. We’ll prioritise applicants based on use cases.
We can’t wait to work together to refine this integration and help make multi-system, shared authority network management simpler, more flexible, and more powerful, with NetBox.
