NetBox Custom Objects Enters General Availability

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of NetBox Custom Objects, which allows users to create no-code extensions to the NetBox data. This milestone marks the culmination of months of intensive development, community feedback, and collaborative refinement that has transformed Custom Objects from an experimental feature into a robust, production-ready addition to NetBox.

Feature Packed with More to Come

A key design goal for Custom Objects has been “as easy to use as Custom Fields and Tags, but with a lot of the power of Plugins” and that’s exactly what we’ve built.

With NetBox Custom Objects, NetBox users can now create data model extensions that share many of the capabilities available to core and plugin objects including: field validation, tags, cloning, import/export, bulk edits, default values, change logging, field grouping and weighting, bookmarks, event rules, notifications, journaling, full-text search, REST API, pynetbox support, and initial NetBox Branching compatibility, with expanded support coming soon.

Users can shape their custom objects to fit their modelling needs with fields referencing scalar values, choicesets, internal objects, plugin objects and other custom objects – including self-referential/recursive relations.

We are already busy refining the next set of features for Custom Objects, which include additional modelling capabilities for polymorphic relations, GraphQL query support, support for configuration management tooling, improving NetBox Branching support and mechanisms to collaborate on Custom Object creation within your company, and across the broader NetBox community.

Community Driven Modelling

As with all new products and features at NetBox Labs our customers, partners and open source community have been involved from the get-go. This input helped shape and prioritize our roadmap, drive important design decisions and most importantly, put Custom Objects through its paces in real-world modelling scenarios.

We’ve seen users across industries already harnessing the power of Custom Objects: Internet Exchanges modeling complex customer relationships, enterprise IT teams mapping application dependencies for impact analysis, telecom providers defining intricate service offerings, and educational institutions creating sophisticated resource-department mappings. Each use case has taught us something new and helped us build a more robust, flexible platform. Check out some of the initial implementations here.

Get Involved

Custom Objects will be made available in NetBox Cloud and NetBox Enterprise in the coming weeks. If you’re a NetBox Labs customer, please contact support to register your interest.

Want to get started today?

• Check out the README for installation instructions and version requirements
• See the docs to learn more about how Custom Objects works
• Check out the release notes to see what’s new in version 0.4.0
• Use our quickstart guide to get a dev instance up and running quickly

We want to hear from you! Share your first custom objects example in the NetDev Slack.