There’s been a flurry of big news recently tied to the release of NetBox 4.1 and the high impact new Branching functionality. Just recently, NetBox 4.1 with Branching has become the default release for new NetBox Cloud and NetBox Enterprise deployments and you can try Branching out for yourself by signing up for a free NetBox Cloud account. Today, we’re announcing the availability of another powerful new family of functionality exclusively available in NetBox Enterprise and NetBox Cloud: NetBox Change Management. This new feature family brings powerful workflows to NetBox for team collaboration in designing, testing, and deploying network and infrastructure changes.
Change Management is available today as a customer preview. If you’re currently a NetBox Enterprise or NetBox Cloud customer, you can upgrade your instance to the required NetBox 4.1.1 or greater and Branching 0.6.0 or greater, and reach out to our support team to enable the Change Management functionality. When Change Management enters general availability this fall, it will be enabled by default for all NetBox Cloud free plan accounts, and existing free plan instances will be automatically upgraded.
Why Change Management?
NetBox Branching unlocks a number of benefits for teams working on changes in their networks and infrastructure, such as better change tracking, staging of related changes, change conflict resolution, and much more. Teams collaborating on complex changes, or on a lot of changes, want governance and visibility into changes, especially when it comes to mission critical infrastructure as is commonly managed with NetBox. The new Change Management capabilities in NetBox Enterprise and NetBox Cloud make it possible to achieve use cases like:
- Enforcing that any changes to core routing infrastructure are reviewed and signed off by multiple architects
- Auditing past changes to understand why they were made, who made them, and who signed off on them
- Discussion and revisions for complex changes – similar to code review workflows in software development
And much more. As we worked closely with our many design partners to build NetBox Branching, these Change Management needs rose frequently to the forefront, especially for organizations with complex network infrastructure or with more than a couple engineers in the team making infrastructure changes.
What Does Change Management Do?
NetBox Change Management includes a host of valuable features out of the gate. Let’s take a look.
First, you can now create a change request (CR) from within a branch to begin to collaborate with others in the team on changes captured in the branch. For those familiar with GitHub’s pull requests, this concept will feel familiar. A change request is created using the new “Request Review” button when working in a branch in NetBox:
It’s easy to take a look at all open CRs to get a quick overview of current activity. CRs can be prioritized, and it’s easy at a glance to see which CRs are open, which are completed, and so on – along with the status of the branch to which the CR is attached.
You can also take a deeper look at each CR, and it’s easy to audit every detail of current and historical CRs, such as:
- Who created the CR
- Who modified it afterwards, and when
- Who reviewed the CR
- Who approved the CR
- Who merged the changes
Every change request supports all the operations you’d probably expect. Participants in a CR can:
- Publish general comments in the CR
- Request changes to the CR
- Subscribe for notifications of changes to the CR
- Discuss individual changes using threaded comments
- Resolve threaded comments once the discussion is closed
- Post approvals
Change Management also supports the definition of custom review policies, which identify requirements for review and approval of a CR. Review policies are attached to CRs and are powerful tools to govern changes to critical infrastructure. Here’s a look at a simple review policy, which incorporates several policy rules for automated validation of changes and review by different groups within the team:
Creating a policy rule is easy – here’s a look:
A branch can only be merged to main once the conditions of the applicable change policies have been met.
Change Management is a hugely powerful feature family already, but as we’ve worked with NetBox Labs customers to build it, a universe of new possibilities has emerged, and there’s much more on the docket. A number of additional features are in flight, including:
- The ability to protect the main branch, preventing any changes not governed by change policies
- Defined orderings for required reviews to enable review workflows
- Automated reviews of changes powered by NetBox custom scripts
Get started with Change Management now
Change Management is available for customer preview in NetBox Enterprise and NetBox Cloud today. Here’s how to get started:
- Current NetBox Labs customer? Contact our support team and we’ll help you upgrade to get access to Change Management
- Using the NetBox Cloud free plan? Your instances will be automatically upgraded to include Change Management when Change Management enters general availability in the coming weeks
- Want a guided walkthrough? Reach out to our team for a demo
- We’re also hosting an upcoming webinar reviewing the new Change Management functionality: sign up to join us live. (Recording and slides will be sent to all registrants after the live webinar.)
