NetBox 4.1 is now in beta! With the GA release slated for early September, NetBox 4.1 will bring some big benefits to the NetBox community, including some very visible changes. Here’s a quick rundown of what you can expect.
First, as a refresher, there’s a new minor (x.y) release of NetBox about 3 times a year – roughly every four months – and there have been new major releases roughly every couple years. Earlier this year in May, NetBox turned “4.0”, and NetBox as a project turned 8 years old just a few weeks later. Across dozens of minor releases over those 8 years, NetBox has had a remarkable forward march – always delivering new features with input from the NetBox community, and always guided by the project’s core principles and design philosophy. NetBox knows what it is: the world’s most powerful and popular network source of truth and model for documenting, modeling, and automating your infrastructure. And the NetBox project has kept its focus, always expanding its data model for replicating real-world infrastructure, and its capabilities for managing and leveraging that data – not getting bogged down or distracted from its core mission.
NetBox 4.1 is no different, and most of the work in this release has been about expanding NetBox’s data modeling capabilities, making it easier to extend NetBox, and making NetBox’s user experience better and more integrated with your workflows.
Data model expansions and improvements
This release introduces two entirely new object types: circuit groups and rack types. Circuit groups can be used to organize circuits administratively, e.g. for capacity planning or redundancy mapping. Each circuit assigned to a group can optionally be assigned a specific priority to assist in defining a failover strategy.
Rack types are similar in nature to device types, in that they define the physical characteristics of a particular make and model of equipment rack. Users can now define a rack type for a particular manufacturer’s product, and populate its attributes such as height, width, weight, and numbering. New racks of that type will then have these attributes populated automatically.
Another headline extension to the data model is the ability to nest device modules. Many network devices use removable line cards which themselves contain submodules. For example, a Juniper MX 960 router supports up to six Flexible PIC Concentrators (FPCs), and each FPC supports two Physical Interface Cards (PICs). While it’s possible to model these on prior NetBox versions, NetBox v4.1 introduces support for nested module bays to more accurately convey the physical hierarchy.
Continued investment in the NetBox plugin ecosystem
Over the first half of 2024, there was significant focus from NetBox Labs and the community on making the NetBox plugin experience better. NetBox boasts a massive and dynamic plugin ecosystem that extends the data model, adds new functionality, and integrates other tools and data sets. A few months ago, we announced the NetBox Labs Certified Plugin program to ensure consistent compatibility of key NetBox plugins, and we recently awarded another bounty from the NetBox Community Fund’s plugin bounty program.
The focus on the plugin experience continues with NetBox 4.1. This release introduces direct integration with the NetBox plugins catalog, with users now able to browse for new plugins and check for updates to installed plugins directly within the NetBox web interface.
Additionally, NetBox v4.1 continues to expand plugin capabilities by introducing official support for background jobs – which allow a plugin to defer long-running tasks – and several new means of embedding custom content within the user interface. Plugins can also now register custom event types for use with event rules.
Improving the NetBox user experience
Some changes to the NetBox user interface will be immediately apparent to long-time users. Following the UI overhaul in NetBox v4.0, this release continues to iterate on the web interface’s design and visual theme.
In addition to some cosmetic improvements, this release tackles some usability issues by restructuring the underlying HTML, addressing color contrast issues, and improving support for screen readers. We’ll continue work on this front throughout the v4.1 cycle, with an ultimate goal of reaching WCAG 2 compliance.
NetBox v4.1 also introduces a new user notifications framework. Users can subscribe to individual objects and be alerted to changes. And event rules can be defined to automatically notify groups of users in response to certain events within NetBox.
Branching: a fundamental unlock for working with your data in NetBox
One of the most impactful areas of focus in the 4.1 cycle has been a major effort to introduce branching and change management capabilities for working with your data in NetBox. NetBox’s branching features are similar to git: they enable you to create, work natively with, and merge branches of your NetBox data to unlock an array of new workflows and use cases. Branching has been in a “private preview” phase with dozens of organizations over the last few weeks, and the response has been incredibly positive.
NetBox’s branching features will be released as a plugin, so teams can choose whether to enable the capability in their deployment. The NetBox branching plugin will be available to the entire community, and will move into open beta next week for everyone to try. We expect the branching plugin to be generally available within a day or two of the NetBox 4.1 release, and you will need to upgrade to NetBox 4.1 to use branching.
With branching, as well as the related change management features in NetBox Enterprise and NetBox Cloud – like change requests, review and approval workflows, and merge policies – NetBox’s value will grow substantially. NetBox is already central to the operations of network and infrastructure teams. The use cases unlocked by branching and change management will cement NetBox’s role as the central tool for managing all stages of the infrastructure lifecycle, from planning and design to ongoing operations to infrastructure expansions and wind-downs.
We’re excited to release the NetBox branching plugin beta for the community next week!
Get started with NetBox 4.1 beta today
Want to get your hands on the 4.1 beta release? As usual, there’s an open demo with the beta deployment for you to check out, or follow the installation instructions to try it out. Found a bug? Please follow the documented process for reporting it on GitHub so we can use the next few weeks to shake 4.1 down and ensure it’s rock solid for GA in early September.
