NetBox Assurance Adds Fleet Management and a New Way to Clear Drift

Your system of record holds what the network should be. Discovery finds what it is. NetBox Assurance tracks the gap. Closing it across an estate takes two jobs: running Discovery across your network infrastructure, and working through what it finds.

Starting today, both jobs happen in one place. The platform brings together Fleet Management, where you manage and monitor your Discovery agents, and the Assurance deviation queue, where you review what Discovery found. You can see exactly what each change does to the record, and nothing is added to NetBox until you approve it. Both are in public preview and included in NetBox Assurance.

From config files to a managed fleet

Until now, operating the Orb agents that power Discovery meant working at the level of individual machines: a hand-edited configuration per agent, device credentials embedded in those files, and an SSH session as your only window into whether anything was running. It worked, but it treated the fleet as a collection of boxes rather than a system.

Fleet Management moves operations to the platform. Your fleet becomes a first-class part of Assurance, with every Discovery agent centrally managed, credentialed, and monitored. The Orb agents stay on your infrastructure, connecting outbound. And the drift they surface is handled on the platform, so deploying Discovery and clearing the queue are part of a single product experience.

What’s in the preview

Coverage that keeps pace with the network

Orb agents power Discovery. They run on your own infrastructure and observe what is on the network, and Fleet Management is how you deploy and operate them at scale. (Not to be confused with NetBox Agents, the AI capability that entered public preview last month.)

Discovery jobs are now built in a guided wizard. Pick the job type (Device or Network), select the Orb agents that will run it, set a schedule, define your discovery scope, and choose an existing credential or add a new one. The platform generates and manages the underlying configuration for you. You can still edit it, but you never have to write it from scratch.

Create a username and password credential once, keep it in the vault you already run, and bind it to the devices it unlocks. The platform delivers it to Orb agents only when a job executes, so security owns the secrets and the network team runs Discovery.

Fleet health is continuous. Each registered Orb agent is shown as online, offline, or stale, and every run includes its status, results, and failure reason.

Every change reviewed before it lands

You review deviations on the platform, where they share a single navigation with jobs, run history, Orb agents, and credentials.

The deviation queue, with Discovery jobs, run history, Orb agents, and credentials in one navigation.

Every deviation opens to a before and after comparison of each change, so the reviewer can see exactly what will change in NetBox. Nothing reaches the record until a reviewer approves it, and every write is auditable after the fact.

Each change is shown before and after, so the reviewer sees exactly what will change.

How to get hands-on

The public preview opens today for customers running NetBox Assurance on the SaaS edition, with the self-managed edition to follow.

Both capabilities are part of your existing NetBox Assurance subscription. Nothing changes for open source NetBox or the Orb agent, which stays Apache 2.0. On the self-managed edition, Assurance keeps working and stays supported as it does today.

Reach out to your account executive or customer success manager to have it enabled.

Not using NetBox Assurance yet? Request a demo, and we will walk you through it, along with the rest of the platform.