Just last week we announced that NetBox AI is coming in 2025, with a host of new features powered by rapidly evolving AI models and NetBox Labs data, starting with the NetBox AI Enrichment API. Today we’re excited to announce another new feature, available today in preview for NetBox Cloud customers: NetBox AI Upgrade Risk Analysis.
Upgrading NetBox with confidence can be a challenge for NetBox users who’ve integrated NetBox into automations, built integrations, and created custom plugins and scripts. NetBox is a complex product with a lot of moving parts and a constant stream of new features and improvements, and while that comprehensiveness and velocity has driven NetBox’s popularity, they also introduce lots of considerations when upgrading NetBox versions.
I was speaking recently with a NetBox Labs customer who had upgraded NetBox from version 3.4 to a more recent 4.x version. The upgrade process required a lot of care because the customer had built their own plugins, integrated in-house tools with NetBox’s REST APIs, and was using several custom scripts to automate their workflows. NetBox’s API, plugin, and custom script interfaces have gone through several revisions as models have evolved, resulting in an upgrade process that required significant testing on the customer’s part to ensure compatibility with all their customizations.
Derisking NetBox upgrades is a need we’ve had our eyes on for a long time, and at NetBox Labs we’ve put a lot of work into helping our customers upgrade with confidence. The NetBox maintainers craft detailed release notes capturing every breaking change. Every NetBox Enterprise and NetBox Cloud Pro and Enterprise deployment ships standard with dev and staging environments to streamline validation of new versions against customer use cases. Our experienced customer support team, which manages thousands of NetBox upgrades in every release cycle, gets hands-on with customers to ensure a smooth upgrade process. We’ve developed a variety of tooling to help accelerate NetBox upgrades across upgrade paths that span complex changes.
The New NetBox AI Upgrade Risk Analysis Feature
Now, we’re excited to make NetBox upgrades even easier. The new NetBox AI Upgrade Risk Analysis feature uses the power of NetBox AI to automatically analyze a NetBox upgrade path, along with a customer’s unique customizations, to identify potential issues and provide a plan for a successful upgrade. An Upgrade Risk Analysis report considers every version and change in the upgrade path. Then, it identifies changes that may impact your use of NetBox based on your custom plugins, scripts, API integrations, and configuration.
Upgrade Risk Analysis reports identify specific risks in the upgrade path based on your usage of NetBox
NetBox Cloud customers that opt-in to the preview will receive Upgrade Risk Analysis reports from NetBox Labs in advance of each NetBox Cloud upgrade to assist with planning and preparation. Here are some examples of ways this new feature can help our customers upgrade NetBox more confidently:
- Identify model changes (like field changes, changes to foreign key relationships, and the like) that may break one of your custom scripts, and suggest changes you should make to ensure compatibility with the new version
- Identify API calls you make frequently that may be impacted by changes to the API interface or underlying data models, and suggest steps you can take to ensure your integrations continue to work
- Find and suggest fixes for configuration issues that may prevent your upgrade from completing successfully
- Identify code dependencies in your custom plugins that may need to be updated with new libraries or imports to ensure your plugins will work with the upgraded NetBox version
As an example, here’s a snippet from an Upgrade Risk Analysis report for a NetBox Labs customer onboarding to NetBox 4.2.2 from a legacy version of NetBox:
Upgrade Risk Analysis snippet from a complex upgrade path
Accelerating and Derisking NetBox Upgrades
NetBox AI Upgrade Risk Analysis is a new capability, and it isn’t a silver bullet for all upgrade scenarios, but it’s a great starting point for accelerating and derisking NetBox upgrades. We’re excited to share Upgrade Risk Analysis with our NetBox Cloud Pro and Enterprise tier customers, and we’ll be iterating quickly based on our findings and feedback during the customer preview period. We expect to make the feature available to NetBox Enterprise customers over time as well.
NetBox Cloud Pro and Enterprise customers will need to opt in to the preview to receive Upgrade Risk Analysis reports. Reach out to our customer success team at support@netboxlabs.com to learn more, or drop our product team a note at product@netboxlabs.com if you’d like to learn more about the feature but aren’t a NetBox Labs customer.
