Introducing NetBox 4.3: Driving Innovation Across the NetBox Ecosystem

We’re thrilled to announce the GA release of NetBox 4.3, marking a significant milestone in our mission to help engineers build and manage complex networks and infrastructure. This new version brings an array of powerful features and enhancements designed to improve how networks are managed, providing a more dynamic, efficient, and scalable solution for operations teams.

But NetBox 4.3 isn’t just about the core platform—it’s part of a broader NetBox ecosystem that continues to expand and evolve, empowering organizations to take their network management to the next level. In this blog post, we’ll highlight the key features of NetBox 4.3 and explore its growing ecosystem of related products, tools, and integrations.

What’s New in NetBox 4.3?

NetBox 4.3 introduces several important features and enhancements aimed at increasing flexibility and usability for network and infrastructure documentation and automation. Some of the notable updates include:

• Module Type Profiles & Custom Attributes: Enhanced support for hardware modeling now includes detailed module type profiles and the ability to add custom attributes. This allows for richer documentation and more precise tracking of hardware components. For example, you can now define custom attributes such as power consumption, clock speed, or firmware version for specific modules, providing greater detail and accuracy in your infrastructure documentation.
• GraphQL API Enhancements: Advanced filtering capabilities now enable the use of complex logical expressions, such as combining filters with AND/OR conditions, for more precise and powerful queries. These enhancements make it easier to build sophisticated network automation workflows and integrate NetBox into broader operational systems, while also improving standards compliance and overall query efficiency.
• Hierarchical Device Roles: Device roles can now be organized hierarchically, making it easier to manage and visualize complex role structures within your network.
• Periodic Synchronization of Data Sources: Data sources can now be configured for periodic synchronization, streamlining data consistency and reducing manual management efforts.

You can find a full list of the new features and updates in the NetBox 4.3 release notes.

The Growing NetBox Ecosystem

While NetBox 4.3 is a significant release, it’s just one piece of a much larger, rapidly evolving ecosystem. The NetBox ecosystem consists of a wide range of products, tools, and integrations designed to work together, providing unmatched power and flexibility for network and infrastructure operations, observability, automation, and security. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most exciting ecosystem products and enhancements since the NetBox 4.2 release.

NetBox Assurance: Ensuring Network Integrity

The newly released NetBox Assurance provides the detection and resolution capabilities necessary to tame operational drift in your network. If you haven’t already, check out our NetBox Assurance blog to learn more about how this tool ensures operational integrity and empowers network teams to address issues before they impact their network.

Diode is an enhanced data ingestion service designed to streamline and simplify the process of importing network data into NetBox. Building on the latest Diode release, NetBox Assurance now offers advanced capabilities to address a broader set of network management use cases, from building initial network documentation to validating network automation changes.

NetBox Discovery Agent: A Smarter Way to Automate Network Discovery

The NetBox Discovery agent continues to evolve as a leading open-source tool for automating network discovery and mapping. With the latest release of Orb, organizations can now manage NetBox Discovery agent policies from a centralized repository (think git, GitHub, GitLab) and manage secrets and other sensitive information using a vault (such as Hashicorp Vault).

The NetBox Discovery agent works seamlessly with NetBox Assurance or Diode, enabling discovery data to be directly integrated into NetBox, where it can be used to enrich network documentation and drive automation workflows.

Discovery Integrations: Mapping Your Entire Network

Discovery integrations, deployed as workers within the NetBox Discovery agent, extend the breadth of the NetBox ecosystem by allowing users to pull in network information from a broad variety of sources. New integrations for Juniper Mist, VMware vCenter, Microsoft DHCP, Cisco Catalyst Center, AWS VPC IPAM, Infoblox, Tenable, and more keep NetBox synchronised with controller-centric and cloud-native environments.

Branching Plugin: Managing Network Changes with Ease

The NetBox Branching plugin makes it easy to manage network changes by enabling teams to propose, review, and merge NetBox changes with a familiar Git-style workflow they use for code. The latest release continues building on this innovative feature while providing a number of bug fixes and performance improvements.

Custom Objects Plugin: Tailoring NetBox to Your Needs

The Custom Objects plugin, previously known as Service Mappings, allows users to extend NetBox to support unique documentation and modelling needs. Whether you’re managing custom network services, IoT devices, or proprietary hardware, the Custom Objects plugin makes it easier to capture and model the data that’s important to your business without the need to write code to describe your models.

AI Power-ups: The Future of Network Management and Automation

AI is playing an increasingly important role in shaping the future of network and infrastructure management and automation. With the launch of several AI-powered features in NetBox, organizations can leverage intelligent insights to streamline network operations and enhance decision-making. Explore our blog on how AI is revolutionizing NetBox to learn more about how we are making NetBox better with AI.

The Power of the NetBox Ecosystem: Why It Matters

1. One canonical model — NetBox owns intent, Discovery populates facts, Assurance validates reality, AI makes it actionable.
2. Open & composable — Every component is built on open source foundations and built with an API-first, integration focused architecture. Swap parts without lock-in, and extend the data model to meet your organization’s requirements.
3. Enterprise-ready — Cloud, Enterprise, and self-hosted editions share code and plugins, so you can start free and scale globally.
4. Relentless velocity — Hundreds of contributors and a dedicated product team ship improvements every week.

Conclusion: A Dynamic, Fast-Growing Ecosystem

The release of NetBox 4.3 is just one example of the incredible innovations happening within the NetBox ecosystem. As the community continues to grow, so too does the power and flexibility of NetBox and its related products. From NetBox Assurance and NetBox Discovery to advanced plugins and AI capabilities, the ecosystem is a testament to the dynamic, fast-paced nature of the NetBox project.

Whether you’re new to NetBox or a long-time user, there has never been a better time to get involved and explore the full potential of what NetBox and its ecosystem can do for your network operations.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates and continue following the NetBox community for the latest innovations and enhancements.