For years now NetBox users have enjoyed customization options including Tags, Custom Fields and Plugins, and hundreds of organizations have used these capabilities to successfully operate dynamic and complex infrastructure at great scale.
Building on this success, many in the NetBox community have sought ways to extend the NetBox data model, seeking approaches that combine the simplicity of Tags and Custom Fields, with the power of Plugins, without requiring users to write and maintain Python code.
NetBox Custom Objects provides users with a no-code ability to extend the NetBox data model, and we’re pleased to announce that Custom Objects has now entered Public Preview.
At NetBox Labs we are fortunate to get to work with a huge community of NetBox users when developing new features and NetBox Custom Objects has been an incredible showcase for that collaboration.
From the moment we announced the Tech Preview in February (note: the feature was called Service Mappings at the time) we had community members sharing their interest and expertise. The Custom Objects Private Preview, announced in April, attracted the largest response in NetBox Labs history. I’d like to say a huge thank you to all those who joined the Private Preview and shared their feedback, and to those who we couldn’t fit in the program, thanks for your patience!
At NetBox Labs our Public Preview product lifecycle stage is the final stage before GA and a great way for all community members to try our upcoming products and features, and provide their feedback. The Public Preview phase can be thought of as a beta release: there is much still to be done, but Custom Objects is now at the point where it is stable and useful enough to widen the feedback to all interested parties.
If you’d like to test out NetBox Custom Objects, please keep the following useful pointers in mind:
We’re taking our time with the Custom Objects public preview, and expect to move to General Availability around the NetBox 4.4 release in early September. This is not only because we want to give the NetBox community the chance to provide feedback, but also because we still have a whole bunch of features that we’re quickly adding, both to complete existing functionality and also around exciting new ideas like making custom objects, and collections of custom objects, easier to share and collaborate on for the whole community.
We hope you have fun experimenting with this powerful new feature, and we look forward to hearing your feedback.